161 Quotes by Susanna Kaysen

With wild eyes that had seen freedom.

Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat.

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.

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.

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

I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

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

You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.

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