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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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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Life
Busy
Inner
Silent
Tell
Stills
Stalled
Still
Velocity
Persons
Observer
Person
Observers

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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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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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
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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.
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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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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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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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Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
Susanna Kaysen
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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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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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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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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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