161 Quotes by Susanna Kaysen

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

Why I am opposed to antidepressants. Because I think depression has something to tell me. Because often depression is an appropriate reaction.Because I am terrified of changing the functioning of my brain in any way.Because I believe depression is "me", and that without it I would not be "me".Because I can't imagine my life without the time off I get from periodic depression.These are the typical idiotic reasons people give for not wanting to feel better. So in this respect, I am quite normal.

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

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?

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

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

She wasn't blotto, she was plotting.

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.

Asa had a sharp understanding of the future--that is, a time when this would be past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow and made it sweet.