About Susanna Kaysen: Susanna Kaysen is an American author, best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted.
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 perso...
Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… 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. They were not perfect, but they w...
She wasn't blotto, she was plotting.
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 wan...
Freedom was the price of privacy.
Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of r...
My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove their own sanity. Once one member of the family...
Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Nothing," I said. "It's quiet. It's like― I don't know. It's like falling off a cliff." I laughed. "I guess my life will just stop when I get married." It didn't. It wasn't quiet either. And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Gara...
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 ...
Viscosity occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity.In contrast to viscosity's cellular coma, velocity endows every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of knowing and commenting on its own behavior. There is too much perc...
An observer can’t tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
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 coo...
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.
I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Asa had a sharp understanding of the future--that is, a time when would be past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow and made it sweet.
