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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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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Outside
Inside
Hurt
Dies
Interrupted
Thing
Hurts
Trying
Fit
Like
Smile
Kill

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Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it we have something to hide.
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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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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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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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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
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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.
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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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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.
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
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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.
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An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
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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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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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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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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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This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
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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.
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