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: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Something
Intense
Things
Naked
Bible
Terrible
Deadness
Feeling
Noticed
Happened
Replaced
Feelings
Similar
Stories
Greek

More quotes by 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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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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I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
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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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Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
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With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
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As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.
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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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It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.
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There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.
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What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
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Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.
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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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All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
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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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Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
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Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
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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.
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Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
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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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