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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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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Thought
Feel
Feels
Thinking
Thoughts
More quotes by Susanna Kaysen
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.
Susanna Kaysen
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.
Susanna Kaysen
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.
Susanna Kaysen
My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
Susanna Kaysen
Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
Susanna Kaysen
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.
Susanna Kaysen
Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Susanna Kaysen
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
Susanna Kaysen
When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
Susanna Kaysen
Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Susanna Kaysen
Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
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
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Susanna Kaysen
We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.
Susanna Kaysen
I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
Susanna Kaysen
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
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?
Susanna Kaysen
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
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