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It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.

Susanna Kaysen

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Misfortune
Misfortunes
Perfectly
Salvation
Conscious
Times
Reality

More quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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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.
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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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Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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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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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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You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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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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This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
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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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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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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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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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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
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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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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
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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
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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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