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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
Way
Loses
Bare
Liberty
Privacy
Lines
Reached
Gone
Bones
Free
Dignity
Ends
Line
Nothing
Lose
Stripped
Self
Strange
Selves

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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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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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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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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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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
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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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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.
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
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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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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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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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It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
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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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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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Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
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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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