“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.
What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?
I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.
She lit the match.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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 were my friends.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from 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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from 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 person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“With wild eyes that had seen freedom.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco. ”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other's work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going.
INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel.
INTERPRETER TWO: I believe that's because the shoe is too tight.
INTERPRETER ONE: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts.
INTERPRETER TWO: Did you look at it?
INTERPRETER ONE: Looking. It's red.
INTERPRETER TWO: No blood?
INTERPRETER ONE: Nope.
INTERPRETER TWO: Forget about it.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay.
Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
An exemplary piece of confusion.
INTERPRETER ONE: There's a tiger in the corner.
INTERPRETER TWO: No, that's not a tiger- that's a bureau.
INTERPRETER ONE: It's a tiger, it's a tiger!
INTERPRETER TWO: Don't be ridiculous. Let's go look at it.
Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner.
If you are not crazy, the second interpreter's assertion, that this is a bureau, will be acceptable to the first interpreter. If you are crazy, the first interpreter's viewpoint, the tiger theory, will prevail.
The trouble here is that the first interpreter actually sees a tiger. The messages sent between neurons are incorrect somehow. The chemicals triggered are the wrong chemicals, or the impulses are going to the wrong connections. Apparently, this happens often, but the second interpreter jumps in to straighten things out.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from 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.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“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, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
“It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.”
― Susanna Kaysen, quote from Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
Born place: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date November 11, 1948
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“THE THIRD DOSE OF pain meds wore off around one in the morning. They must have, because that’s when Tyler sat straight up and slammed his hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t scream out loud. The pain sliced through his shoulder and straight across the base of his neck, along his collarbone and through his middle.”
― Karen Kingsbury, quote from Angels Walking
“Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.”
― Washington Irving, quote from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
“The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.”
― Jenny Offill, quote from Dept. of Speculation
“You know, how there are some people who have no time for small things? Pettiness, I mean. In the way they let things go - because whatever huge, life-changing thing happened to them gave them a perspective most of us can't ever have.”
― Debbie Howells, quote from The Beauty of the End
“Now, I like to think that I'm of reasonable intelligence, but ordinary differential equations and myself...we don't really hang in the same comprehension circles. So, try as I might to follow my teacher's logic in how he got 3f"(x) + 5xf(x) to equal eleven, I never quite understood. His answer in no way, shape, or form resembled mine, and this misalignment -this complete confusion of how point A got to point B- is kind of where I'm at right now. "Dreaming?" I repeat dubiously.”
― E.J. Mellow, quote from The Dreamer
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