Susanna Kaysen: I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into de...

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

crazy lying children

The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.

Susanna Kaysen

girl-interrupted crazy inspirational

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

Susanna Kaysen

girl-interrupted hurt trying

Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.

Susanna Kaysen

smile-to-the-world cry world

I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.

Susanna Kaysen

girl-interrupted talent survival

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

boredom feelings facts

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

girl-interrupted crazy depression

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

girl-interrupted kitchen suicide

It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.

Susanna Kaysen

criminals insane dying

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

wrinkles hair character

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

luxury clothes self

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

girl-interrupted gun lying

A thought is a hard thing to control.

Susanna Kaysen

hard-things hard

As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.

Susanna Kaysen

skills

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

singers madness poet

Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.

Susanna Kaysen

happy-endings cutting kind

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

suicidal suicide mean

It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.

Susanna Kaysen

numbness distance fall

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.

Susanna Kaysen

doctors perception character

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

pain over-you knowing

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses