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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.

Susanna Kaysen

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Life
Demanded
Skills
Didn

More quotes by 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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There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
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 had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that it was my task to swallow fifty asprin.It was my task:my job for the day.-17 Girl Interrupted
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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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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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?
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
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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.
Susanna Kaysen
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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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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
Susanna Kaysen
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Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.
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.
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.
Susanna Kaysen
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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Susanna Kaysen