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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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
Image
It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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
Image
As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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
Image
Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Susanna Kaysen
Image
Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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.
Susanna Kaysen
Image
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
Image
You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
Susanna Kaysen