Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysenis an American author, best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth11 November 1948
CountryUnited States of America
able reason smoke
It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.
cutting kind happy-endings
Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.
insanity girl-interrupted matter
Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?
cheer-up views san-francisco
Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
character doctors perception
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.
pain knowing over-you
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.
sleep silent pleasure
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.
thinking mountain-ranges mad
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?
stupid thinking people
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.
greek feelings stories
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.
character wrinkles hair
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.
writing men thinking
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.
sad suicide thinking
I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
opposites fascination looks
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.