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00542ee
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Back then I didn't know that I -- or anyone-- could make a life out of boyfriends and literature. As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have. The result was chronic emptiness and boredom. There were more pernicious results as well: selfloathing, alternating with "inappropriately intense anger with frequent displays of temper..."
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Susanna Kaysen |
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aadd20f
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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e8629df
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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a4abdea
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I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions they raise. Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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bcc5fb0
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How many girls do you think a seventeen-year-old boy would have to screw to earn the label "compulsively promiscuous"? Three? No, not enough. Six? Doubtful. Ten? That sounds more likely. Probably in the fifteen-to-twenty range, would be my guess--if they ever put that label on boys, which I don't recall their doing. And for seventeen-year-old girls, how many boys?"
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Susanna Kaysen |
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9a2faf0
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A volte, quando avete capito che il vostro treno non si sta veramente muovendo, potete passare un altro mezzo minuto sospesi tra due regni della coscienza: quello che sa che non vi state muovendo e quello che invece ne ha la sensazione. Potete svolazzare avanti e indietro tra queste percezioni e provare una specie di vertigine mentale. E se e cosi, siete nel territorio della pazzia: un luogo dove le false impressioni hanno tutte le caratter..
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Susanna Kaysen |
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3f219cb
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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 slipcover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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ae7a56c
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Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber. This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of drop..
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madness
insanity
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Susanna Kaysen |
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2d4c20b
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Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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9370f9d
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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. This was the way I felt about the tunnels. They weren't news to anybody else, but they made such an impression on me that I felt I'd conjured them into being.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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2815b0c
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Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I'm not crazy.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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cf7ba1e
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We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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ab6d85a
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You can see why doubting one's own craziness is considered a good sign: It's a sort of flailing response by the second interpreter. What's happening? the second interpreter is saying. He tells me it's a tiger but I'm not convinced; maybe there's something wrong with me. Enough doubt is in there to give "reality" a toehold."
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Susanna Kaysen |
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440ed15
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Reality was getting too dense.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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b3e34ee
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Vittima dell'intolleranza sociale verso comportamenti devianti.
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società
follia
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Susanna Kaysen |
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53fef94
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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e0cd827
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How many girls do you think a seventeen-year-old boy would have to screw to earn the label "compulsively promiscuous"? Three? No, not enough. Six? Doubtful. Ten? That sounds more likely. Probably in the fifteen-to-twenty range, would be my guess--if they ever put that label on boys, which I don't recall their doing. And for seventeen-year-old, how many boys?"
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Susanna Kaysen |
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6b3cb13
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It's a mean world," she'd say. She was usually glad enough to be back. "There's nobody to take care of you out there." --
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Susanna Kaysen |
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d144682
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Or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted
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Susanna Kaysen |
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4f374cc
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imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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d4f59b0
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I wanted to get rid of a certain aspect of my character. I was performing a kind of self-abortion with those aspirin. It worked for a while. Then it stopped; but I had no heart to try again.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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9863abb
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It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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21f37d1
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What does the sign say?" " 'If you lived here, you'd be home now.' " She clenched her hands with excitement. "See, every day people will drive past and read that sign and think, 'Yeah, if I lived here I'd be home now,' and I will be home. Motherfuckers."
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Susanna Kaysen |
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6d37680
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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f4fd047
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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b7849cc
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Back then I didn't know that Ior anyonecould make a life out of boyfriends and literature. As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have. The result was chronic emptiness and boredom. There were more pernicious results as well: selfloathing, alternating with "inappropriately intense anger with frequent displays of temper..."
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Susanna Kaysen |
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ab3f433
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Life was hellish, she knew that. But, her smile hinted, she'd burned all that out of her.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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69163da
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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03da0f7
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Thus, our keepers. As for finders--well, we had to be our own finders.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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7f9a307
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One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but i took it as a compliment.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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7e97525
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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3619e78
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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 slipcover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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aaf1944
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She wasn't blotto, she was plotting.
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lightbulbs
plotting
girl
crazy
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Susanna Kaysen |
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cdd2d79
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I'm Ambivalent. In fact that's my new favorite word. Do you know what it means ? I don't care.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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7b0e6e5
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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cb01fdf
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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.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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d436d03
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Their love story unfolded and then folded up again in Cambridge, as I watched and took mental notes and learned nothing, naturally, because the heart is unteachable.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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4e1fad0
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She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head .
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Susanna Kaysen |
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7ce35ec
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I've gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen. The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other -- the lady and her maid, the soldier and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light -- that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer..
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Susanna Kaysen |
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1304698
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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 want..
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Susanna Kaysen |
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3eb23a2
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sa's smell (the fragrance of a beautiful man) is what I miss the most. [...] Like a virus his smell entered me and changed my cells, slowly, over years, until they craved only that smell, which was their oxygen.
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Susanna Kaysen |
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b14362a
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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?
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Susanna Kaysen |
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68e1443
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But something about the static truth of numbers hurt my brain. Numbers felt sharp. Words felt elastic and springy. Language had an unpredictable, quicksilver quality, saying one thing but meaning something else, varying from place to place but maintaining (against all evidence) that it was the same language. Thinking about words was ticklish and amusing. It was also easy, as if they fit into slots and patterns prepared for them in my mind. ..
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Susanna Kaysen |
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364e121
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He would take refuge in a homey understanding of Faroese ways only to be slapped back to an uncomfortable position as an American by some terrible smell: uncomfortable because he could no more now imagine himself standing at an oak door with a brass knocker, wearing a tie and holding a bottle of Medoc, than he could picture eating rotten meat. He was floating around in cultural hyperspace; nothing felt right.
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Susanna Kaysen |