Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
Susanna Kaysen
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Somewhat
Writer
Cold
Heart
More quotes by Susanna Kaysen
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
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
I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Susanna Kaysen
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
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
Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
Susanna Kaysen
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.
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
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
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
Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
Susanna Kaysen
A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
Susanna Kaysen
Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
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
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
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
In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves
Susanna Kaysen
As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
Susanna Kaysen