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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
Trying
Fit
Like
Smile
Kill
Outside
Inside
Hurt
Dies
Interrupted
Thing
Hurts

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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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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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
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For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin?
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Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
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There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
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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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
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.
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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
Susanna Kaysen
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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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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
Susanna Kaysen