Quote

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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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Cutting
Happy
Away
Everything
Kind
Things
Abruptly
Dribble
Ending

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
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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
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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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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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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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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.
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Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it we have something to hide.
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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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I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
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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.
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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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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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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.
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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
Susanna Kaysen
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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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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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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.
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