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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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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Weren
Discovered
Wind
Though
America
Columbus
Newton
Gravity

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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
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All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
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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
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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.
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My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
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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.
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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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.
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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
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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?
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
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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.
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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
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Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.
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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
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Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat.
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