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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.

Susanna Kaysen

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Mental
Communication
Two
Seems
Problem
Interpreters
Interpreter
Illness

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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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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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
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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.
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All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
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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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It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
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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
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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
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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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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.
Susanna Kaysen
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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
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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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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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This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
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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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Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.
Susanna Kaysen
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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
Susanna Kaysen