Susanna Kaysen (born November 11, 1948) is an American author, best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted.
A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
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 want to cross it again.
Which is worse, overload or underload? Luckily, I never had to choose. One or Pass on to where? Back into my cells to lurk like a virus waiting for the next opportunity? Out into the ether of the world to wait for the circumstances that would provoke its reappearance? Endogenous or exogenous, nature or nurture - it's the great mystery of mental illness.
You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
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.
An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
With wild eyes that had seen freedom.
A thought is a hard thing to control.
Freedom was the price of privacy.
Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.
Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.
Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
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. . .
My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.
My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
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.
You could also "request" to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to "request" to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were ready to come out. Somewhat like looking at a cake through the glass of the oven door.
Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that animates us.
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.