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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

Susanna Kaysen

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Nothing
Lose
Stripped
Self
Strange
Selves
Way
Loses
Bare
Liberty
Privacy
Lines
Reached
Gone
Bones
Free
Dignity
Ends
Line

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Susanna Kaysen
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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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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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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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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
Susanna Kaysen
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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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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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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Susanna Kaysen
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There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
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.
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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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An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
Susanna Kaysen
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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.
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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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
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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
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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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.
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