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Susanna Kaysen quotes - page 2
Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Susanna Kaysen
I told her once I wasn't good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
Susanna Kaysen
"A writer,” I said, when my social worker asked me what I planned to do when I got out of the hospital. "I'm going to be a writer.” "That's a nice hobby, but how are you going to earn a living?” My social worker and I did not like each other. I didn't like her because she didn't understand that this was me, and I was going to be a writer; I was not going to type term bills or sell au gratin bowls or do any other stupid things.
Susanna Kaysen
My family had a lot of characteristics-achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations-that all seemed to be recessive in me.
Susanna Kaysen
When you're sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
Susanna Kaysen
This behavior may... counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl, Interrupted.
Susanna Kaysen
My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
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
My self-image was not unstable. I saw myself, quite correctly, as unfit for the educational and social systems.
Susanna Kaysen
My classmates were spinning their fantasies for the future: lawyer, ethnobotanist, Buddhist monk (it was a very progressive high school). Even the dumb, uninteresting ones who were there to provide "balance” looked forward to their marriages and their children. I knew I wasn't going to have any of this because I knew I didn't want it. But did that mean I would have nothing? I was the first person in the history of the school not to go to college.
Susanna Kaysen
Most of us saw our therapists every day. Cynthia didn't; she had therapy twice a week and shock therapy once a week. And Lisa didn't go to therapy. She had a therapist, but he used her hour to take a nap. If she was extremely bored, she'd demand to be taken to his office, where she'd find him snoozing in his chair. "Gotcha!” she'd say. Then she'd come back to the ward. The rest of us traipsed off day after day to exhume the past.
Susanna Kaysen
The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore; far from it. Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people-some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night. Then came the period when people we knew-not knew personally, but knew of-started falling to the ground: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Was that more alarming? Lisa said it was natural. "They gotta kill them,” she explained. "Otherwise it'll never settle down.”.
Susanna Kaysen
I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and classmates. I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure that's true. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it.
Susanna Kaysen
Is this the type of friend or lover I want to have? I ask myself every time I meet someone new. Charming but shallow; good-hearted but a bit conventional; too handsome for his own good; fascinating but probably unreliable; and so forth. I guess I've had my share of unreliables. More than my share? How many would constitute more than my share?
Susanna Kaysen
Borderline Personality Disorder* An essential feature of this disorder is a pervasive pattern of instability of self-image, interpersonal relationships, and mood, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts. A marked and persistent identity disturbance is almost invariably present. This is often pervasive, and is manifested by uncertainty about several life issues, such as self-image, sexual orientation, long-term goals or career choice, types of friends or lovers to have, and which values to adopt.
Susanna Kaysen
I was that one who wore black and-really, I've heard it from several people-slept with the English teacher.
Susanna Kaysen
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
Later that day, when Alice was off having a Rorschach, I asked, "How can a person who's never eaten honey have a family that can afford to send her here?” "Probably really incredibly crazy and interesting, so they let her in for less,” said Georgina.
Susanna Kaysen
Jerry was willowy and worried. He had one good trick. Now and then, someone with a lot of privileges was allowed to leave the hospital in a taxi. That person would say, "Jerry, call me a cab.” Jerry would say, "You're a cab.”.
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.
Susanna Kaysen
Quite often social contrariness and a generally pessimistic outlook are observed. Alternation between dependency and self-assertion is common.
Susanna Kaysen
I don't have a whole bunch of literary connections. I don't write reviews or attend writer's conferences. I'm kind of shy and don't want to go to a party. I just want to stay home and read my murder mysteries and try to write and cook dinner.
Susanna Kaysen
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