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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Susanna Kaysen
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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Insanity
Matter
Dropping
More quotes by Susanna Kaysen
With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
Susanna Kaysen
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
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
Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
Susanna Kaysen
A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
Susanna Kaysen
It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.
Susanna Kaysen
My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
Susanna Kaysen
It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
Susanna Kaysen
By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor. But they were, and we were their six lunatics, so we behaved like lunatics.
Susanna Kaysen
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Susanna Kaysen
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
In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves
Susanna Kaysen
I noticed that some of my deadness was being replaced by an intense feeling about the Greek stories and the Bible stories. They were similar. There was something naked about these stories. Terrible things happened, and then some more terrible things.
Susanna Kaysen
I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Susanna Kaysen
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
Susanna Kaysen
We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.
Susanna Kaysen
Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.
Susanna Kaysen
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
Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Susanna Kaysen