Top 100 Susanna Kaysen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”

— Susanna Kaysen

2. “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. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.”

— Susanna Kaysen

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

— Susanna Kaysen

4. “Freedom was the price of privacy.”

— Susanna Kaysen

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

— Susanna Kaysen

6. “Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.”

— Susanna Kaysen

7. “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

8. “Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.”

— Susanna Kaysen

9. “There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don’t feel the same.”

— Susanna Kaysen

10. “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

11. “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

12. “And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lost Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.”

— Susanna Kaysen

13. “As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn’t have.”

— Susanna Kaysen

14. “With wild eyes that had seen freedom.”

— Susanna Kaysen

15. “A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”

— Susanna Kaysen

16. “A thought is a hard thing to control.”

— Susanna Kaysen

17. “Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?”

— Susanna Kaysen

18. “This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”

— Susanna Kaysen

19. “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

20. “The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore.”

— Susanna Kaysen

21. “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

22. “Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast. I’m not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.”

— Susanna Kaysen

23. “Crazy isn’t being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It’s just you or me, amplified.”

— Susanna Kaysen

24. “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

25. “One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.”

— Susanna Kaysen

26. “Just to get through life was no ambition. It was the opposite of ambition.”

— Susanna Kaysen

27. “Boyfriends and literature: How can you make a life out of those two things? As it turns out, I did; more literature than boyfriends lately, but I guess you can’t have everything.”

— Susanna Kaysen

28. “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

29. “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

30. “If I could have any job in the world I’d be a professional Cinderella.”

— Susanna Kaysen

31. “It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.”

— Susanna Kaysen

32. “When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy.”

— Susanna Kaysen

33. “When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.”

— Susanna Kaysen

34. “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

35. “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.”

— Susanna Kaysen

36. “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

37. “My family had a lot of characteristics – achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations – that all seemed to be recessive in me.”

— Susanna Kaysen

38. “Sana di mente in un mondo di pazzi.”

— Susanna Kaysen

39. “Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?”

— Susanna Kaysen

40. “If I who was previously revolting am now this far from my crazy self, how much further are you who were never revolting, and how much deeper your revulsion?”

— Susanna Kaysen

41. “Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.”

— Susanna Kaysen

42. “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

43. “Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.”

— Susanna Kaysen

44. “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

45. “Reality was getting too dense.”

— Susanna Kaysen

46. “It’s a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It’s accurate but it isn’t profound.”

— Susanna Kaysen

47. “Thus, our keepers. As for finders – well, we had to be our own finders.”

— Susanna Kaysen

48. “I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.”

— Susanna Kaysen

49. “What does borderline personality mean, anyhow? It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my post-Melvin psychiatrist: “It’s what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.”

— Susanna Kaysen

50. “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.”

— Susanna Kaysen