Top 100 Susanna Kaysen Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.”

— Susanna Kaysen

52. “It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.”

— Susanna Kaysen

53. “We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.”

— Susanna Kaysen

54. “The meat was bruised, bleeding, and imprisoned in a tight wrapping. And, though I had a six-month respite from thinking about it, so was I.”

— Susanna Kaysen

55. “Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.”

— Susanna Kaysen

56. “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.”

— Susanna Kaysen

57. “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.”

— Susanna Kaysen

58. “It never stopped, even at night, it was our lullaby. It was our metronome, our pulse. It was our lives measured out in doses slightly larger than those famous coffee spoons. Soup spoons, maybe? Dented tin spoons brimming with what should have been sweet but was sour, gone off, gone by without our savouring it: our lives.”

— Susanna Kaysen

59. “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.”

— Susanna Kaysen

60. “I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t.”

— Susanna Kaysen

61. “Life was hellish, she knew that. But, her smile hinted, she’d burned all that out of her.”

— Susanna Kaysen

62. “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

63. “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.”

— Susanna Kaysen

64. “That’s because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.”

— Susanna Kaysen

65. “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

66. “What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?”

— Susanna Kaysen

67. “By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor. But they were, and we were their six lunatics, so we behaved like lunatics.”

— Susanna Kaysen

68. “They didn’t have time to wonder why I was a little more miserable than most.”

— Susanna Kaysen

69. “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

70. “The shimmering, ever-shifting borderline, like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed.”

— Susanna Kaysen

71. “Recovered. Had my personality crossed over that border, whatever and wherever it was, to resume life within the confines of normal? Had I stopped arguing with my personality and learned to straddle the line between sane and insane?”

— Susanna Kaysen

72. “Confuse was the nurses’ word for abuse.”

— Susanna Kaysen

73. “All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.”

— Susanna Kaysen

74. “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?”

— Susanna Kaysen

75. “Something had been peeled back, a covering or shell that works to protect us. I couldn’t decide whether the covering was something on me or something attached to every thing in the world. It didn’t matter, really; wherever it had been, it wasn’t there anymore.”

— Susanna Kaysen

76. “The group had an atomic structure: a nucleus of nuts surrounded by darting, nervous nurse-electrons charged with our protection.”

— Susanna Kaysen

77. “Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I’m not crazy.”

— Susanna Kaysen

78. “Lisa’s eyes, once so magnetic, now just look empty.”

— Susanna Kaysen

79. “Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast.”

— Susanna Kaysen

80. “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.”

— Susanna Kaysen

81. “I always got irritated when he told me he wasn’t a doctor. Technically, he was a doctor. Being a doctor is like being a Jew; you can’t get away from it.”

— Susanna Kaysen

82. “It’s one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.”

— Susanna Kaysen

83. “They were all seventeen and miserable, just like me. They didn’t have time to wonder why I was a little more miserable than most.”

— Susanna Kaysen

84. “Particular patterns of thought get attached to particular movements or activities, and before you know it, it’s impossible to approach that movement or activity without dislodging an avalanche of prethought thoughts.”

— Susanna Kaysen

85. “Twenty-five chocolate chip cookies would be the perfect dinner.”

— Susanna Kaysen

86. “Then he heard the hum. Vibrating in consonance with one of the tones of the ocean’s churning, it slid in and out of perceptibility in the way that the landscape disappeared in the mist. But by stilling his breath and, to some degree, his jumping pulse, Jonathan was able to pick it out, the low continuo in the cantata of sea and wind.”

— Susanna Kaysen

87. “I had a character disorder. When I got my diagnosis it didn’t sound serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other people’s. I imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.”

— Susanna Kaysen

88. “In a strange way we were free. We’d reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose.”

— Susanna Kaysen

89. “My friends have hated Asa, first for monopolizing my mind, then for the endless discussions of him they were subjected to, finally, for making me unhappy.”

— Susanna Kaysen

90. “There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don’t feel the same. They must reflect quite different aspects of brain function. The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions.”

— Susanna Kaysen

91. “Can human beings love each other? Must we always love an image we’ve labored over secretly, never love the living soul with all its mire and murk?”

— Susanna Kaysen

92. “Greece was a long lesson in my insignificance.”

— Susanna Kaysen

93. “You spent nearly two years in a loony bin! Why in the world were you in there? I can’t believe it!” Translation: If you’re crazy, then I’m crazy, and I’m not, so the whole thing must have been a mistake. “You spent nearly two years in a loony bin? What was wrong with you?” Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I’m not crazy. “You spent nearly two years in a loony bin? Hmmm. When was that, exactly?” Translation: Are you still contagious?”

— Susanna Kaysen

94. “These thoughts have no meaning. They are idiot mantras that exist in a prearranged cycle; I’m no good, I’m the Angel of Death, I’m stupid, I can’t do anything. Thinking the first thought triggers the whole circuit.”

— Susanna Kaysen

95. “They were living out lives we might have been living, if we hadn’t been occupied with being mental patients.”

— Susanna Kaysen

96. “My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world.”

— Susanna Kaysen

97. “Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”

— Susanna Kaysen

98. “This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted. I could revise the empty space inside me so that it had a better shape: the outline of a happy childhood.”

— Susanna Kaysen

99. “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.”

— Susanna Kaysen

100. “When digital watches were invented years later they reminded me of five-minute checks. They murdered time in the same way -slowly- chopping off pieces of it and lobbing them into the dustbin with a little click to let you know time was gone. Click, swish, “Checks,” swish, click: another five minutes of life down the drain. And spent in this place.”

— Susanna Kaysen