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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

Susanna Kaysen

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Cadence
Meter
Makers
Mad
Rhythm
Makes

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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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
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
Susanna Kaysen
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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
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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
Susanna Kaysen
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Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
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It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
Susanna Kaysen
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You could also request to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to request to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were ready to come out. Somewhat like looking at a cake through the glass of the oven door.
Susanna Kaysen
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All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Susanna Kaysen
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Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Susanna Kaysen
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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Susanna Kaysen
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
Susanna Kaysen
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It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.
Susanna Kaysen
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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
Susanna Kaysen
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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
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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
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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
Susanna Kaysen
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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
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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
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Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.
Susanna Kaysen