{"author":"Susanna Kaysen","author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen","total_quotes":29,"quotes":[{"text":"Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… 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. They were not perfect, but they were my friends.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["crazy","friendship","insanity","madness"],"id":3096,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, 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. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.She lit the match.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["aspirin","failed-attempt","gun","match","suicide"],"id":6866,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"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 dropping the act? If some people didn’t see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["doubt","insanity","madness"],"id":10405,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"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.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["craziness","psychology","sanity"],"id":61359,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["psychology","reality"],"id":63845,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast... 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.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["fascination","insanity","stillness","velocity","viscosity"],"id":65470,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"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.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["crazy","girl-interrupted","insanity","mental-illness"],"id":80275,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"Viscosity occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity.In contrast to viscosity's cellular coma, velocity endows every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of knowing and commenting on its own behavior. There is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having perceptions. Digestion could kill you! What I mean is the unceasing awareness of the processes of digestion could exhaust you to death. And digestion is just an involuntary sideline to thinking, which is where the real trouble begins.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["girl-interrupted","mental-health","mental-illness","susanna-kaysen"],"id":80464,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"Freedom was the price of privacy.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["dark","humor","inspirational"],"id":112452,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"},{"text":"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.","author":"Susanna Kaysen","tags":["suicide"],"id":132475,"author_id":"Susanna+Kaysen"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":29,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}