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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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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Asleep
Offered
Awake
Supposed
Silent
Sleep
Pleasure
Avoided

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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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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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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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
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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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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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My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
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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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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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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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It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
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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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Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
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All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
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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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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
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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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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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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Susanna Kaysen