Quote

I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that it was my task to swallow fifty asprin.It was my task:my job for the day.-17 Girl Interrupted

Susanna Kaysen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Fifty
Task
Tasks
Inspiration
Knew
Morning
Swallow
Girl
Woke
Jobs
Interrupted

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

Image
With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn’t dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I’d managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter, airier than I’d been in years.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range?
Susanna Kaysen
Image
I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
Susanna Kaysen
Image
As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is stale, flat and unprofitable even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
Susanna Kaysen