Quote

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

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Susanna Kaysen
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Things
Naked
Bible
Terrible
Deadness
Feeling
Noticed
Happened
Replaced
Feelings
Similar
Stories
Greek
Something
Intense

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When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
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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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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
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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.
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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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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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A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
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I'm your mind, it claims. You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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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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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.
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Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
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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.
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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?
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