79+ Susanna Kaysen Quotes On Education, Friendship And Happiness

Susanna Kaysen is an American author, best known for her 1993 memoir, Girl, Interrupted. The book details her two-year stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s and explores themes of identity, mental illness, and the medicalization of women. Kaysen is also the author of several other books, including Far Afield, Asa, as I Knew Him, and Camouflage. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Susanna Kaysen on education, friendship, love.

Top 10 Susanna Kaysen Quotes

1. 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.
2. The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.
3. Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
4. I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.
5. I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
6. 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.
7. My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
8. Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
9. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
• It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.
• When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
• You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
• Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
• With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
• A thought is a hard thing to control.
• Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
• The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.
• As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.

Susanna Kaysen Quotes About Girl Interrupted

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

The girl at her music sits in another sort of light,the fitful,overcast light of lie,by which we see ourselves and others only imprefectly, and seldom..-Girl,Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen

This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen

I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that it was my task to swallow fifty asprin.It was my task:my job for the day.-17 Girl Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen

I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. — Susanna Kaysen

Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy. — Susanna Kaysen

My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me. — Susanna Kaysen

If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella. — Susanna Kaysen

A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. — Susanna Kaysen

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. — Susanna Kaysen

Susanna Kaysen Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Susanna Kaysen

Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. — Susanna Kaysen

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness? — Susanna Kaysen

Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy. — Susanna Kaysen

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. — Susanna Kaysen

Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression. Isn't there some other way to look at this? After all, angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well fed, clothes, and housed to have time for this much self-pity. — Susanna Kaysen

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

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. — Susanna Kaysen

When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy. — Susanna Kaysen

I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition. — Susanna Kaysen

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? — Susanna Kaysen

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. — Susanna Kaysen

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. — Susanna Kaysen

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. — Susanna Kaysen

Tell me that you don’t take that blade and drag it across your skin and pray for the courage to press down. — Susanna Kaysen

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

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

Maybe, there's a moment growing up when something peels back... Maybe, maybe, we look for secrets because we can't believe our minds... — Susanna Kaysen

It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather. — Susanna Kaysen

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom. — Susanna Kaysen

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

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

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

I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future. — Susanna Kaysen

... now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there. — Susanna Kaysen

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. — Susanna Kaysen

Confuse was the nurses' word for abuse. — Susanna Kaysen

Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again. — Susanna Kaysen

Which is worse, overload or underload? Luckily, I never had to choose. One or Pass on to where? Back into my cells to lurk like a virus waiting for the next opportunity? Out into the ether of the world to wait for the circumstances that would provoke its reappearance? Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture - it's the great mystery of mental illness. — Susanna Kaysen

Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that animates us. — Susanna Kaysen

It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. — Susanna Kaysen

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses — Susanna Kaysen

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

Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her. — Susanna Kaysen

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

What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad? — Susanna Kaysen

Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast. I'm not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts. — Susanna Kaysen

There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same. — Susanna Kaysen

It's a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It's accurate but it isn't profound. — Susanna Kaysen

Disease [is] as one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her. — Susanna Kaysen

Being crasy doesn't mean to be broken...It is you and me amplified", Girl, Interrupted — Susanna Kaysen

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. — Susanna Kaysen

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces, flowers. — Susanna Kaysen

And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lost Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future. — Susanna Kaysen

The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark--why not kill myself? Missed the bus--better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie--maybe I shouldn't kill myself. — Susanna Kaysen

Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry. — Susanna Kaysen

All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No. — Susanna Kaysen

Freedom was the price of privacy. — Susanna Kaysen

This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? — Susanna Kaysen

Life Lessons by Susanna Kaysen

1. Susanna Kaysen's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting one's own mental health journey, no matter how difficult it may be.
2. Through her writing, Kaysen encourages readers to recognize the power of resilience and self-reflection in order to make meaningful changes in their lives.
3. Kaysen's work serves as a reminder that everyone's mental health journey is unique and valid, and that it is possible to find strength and hope even in the darkest of times.