Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysenis an American author, best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth11 November 1948
CountryUnited States of America
world
The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.
boredom despair emptiness
Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.
black-and-white night ice-cream
The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor.
dying insane world
It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
doctors disease language
Disease [is] as one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.
crazy men heartless
When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy.
country writing data
For nearly a century the psychoanalysts have been writing op-ed pieces about the workings of a country they've never traveled to, a place that, like China, has been off-limits. Suddenly, the country has opened its borders and is crawling with foreign correspondents, neurobiologists are filing ten stories a week, filled with new data. These two groups of writers, however, don't seem to read each other's work. That's because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.
teacher flirting way
Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.
privacy
Freedom was the price of privacy.
heart cold cold-heart
You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
ice-cream expression nurse
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.
glasses doors cake
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.
my-future needed wanted
I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.
growing-up believe girl-interrupted
Maybe, there's a moment growing up when something peels back... Maybe, maybe, we look for secrets because we can't believe our mind.