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
Devotion Girl Interrupted quotations
The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.


Crazy isn't being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me, amplified.
I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
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.

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.
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.
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

To go from Girl, Interrupted, where I had to cry every day, to a TV show like West Wing where I get to laugh and joke around every day, has been a welcome relief.
To go from Girl, Interrupted, where I had to cry every day, to a TV show like West Wing where I get to laugh and joke around every day, has been a welcome relief.
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

This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
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.

Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.
one doesn't interrupt a beautiful girl unless one is going to be funny.
My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.

A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
Tell me that you don’t take that blade and drag it across your skin and pray for the courage to press down.
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.

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.
When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
If I could have any job in the world I'd be a professional Cinderella.

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.
Maybe, there's a moment growing up when something peels back.
.. Maybe, maybe, we look for secrets because we can't believe our minds...
It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.

Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books.
In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.
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?
He came, not as a flash of light or as an unapproachable conqueror, but as one whose first cries were heard by a peasant girl and a sleepy carpenter. God tapped humanity on its collective shoulder, "Pardon me," he said, and eternity interrupted time, divinity interrupted carnality, and heaven interrupted the earth in the form of a baby. Christianity was born in one big heavenly interruption.

Oh," he said, knocking a red ball into a hole.
"It's you." "You were expecting someone else?" I asked. "Am I interrupting your social calender?" I made a big show of glancing around the empty room. "I don't want to keep you from the mob of fans beating down your door." "Hey, a guy can hope. I mean, it's not impossible that a car full of scantily clad sorority girls might break down outside and need my help.
Being crasy doesn't mean to be broken...It is you and me amplified", Girl, Interrupted
You wouldn't have taken Rose to such a place, would you?" "Of course not, but she is a little girl, and I'm-" "My life", he interrupted quietly. "You're my entire life. If anything ever happens to you, Holly, there is nothing left for me.
You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,' Ellen told her daughter.
'You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.