Susanna Kaysen (1993)
Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe
“And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe.”
“Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then”
“Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.”
The Taxi
“But I was too tired.”
Fire
“Scar tissue has no character. It’s not like skin. It doesn’t show age or illness or pallor or tan. … That’s why we grow it; we have something to hide.”
“I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew today I had to swallow fifty aspirin.”
“She lit the match.”
“We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.”
Freedom
“”Cheese-pussy!” And another favorite, “You schizophrenic bat!””
“I need rest too,” she said. “Just because I don’t sleep doesn’t mean I don’t rest.”
Politics
“… and I kept screaming, and Georgina did nothing. She stood still with her candied hand stretched out in front of her.”
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
“… a strange sweet smell wafted briefly into the hall.”
“It was her birthday, wasn’t it?”
My Suicide
“It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead…”
“I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t.”
“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.”
“For a moment, I felt compassion for myself and all the unhappiness I contained.”
“The meat was bruised, bleeding, and imprisoned in a tight wrapping. And… so was I.”
Elementary Topography
“Reality was getting too dense.”
“It was my misfortune-or salvation-to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality.”
“… but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence.”
Ice Cream
“It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.”
Another Lisa
“”A suburban junkie,” said Lisa. “You were playing, that’s what.””
Checkmate
“”You’ll get over it,” she told me. “What choice have you got?”
Do You Believe Him or Me?
“I’d switched night and day- that was one of the things the doctor harped on.”
Velocity vs. Viscosity
“Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast.”
“Time is slow, dripping slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception.”
“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.”
“An observer can’t tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.”
“Once, these thoughts must have had a meaning. They must have meant what they said. But repetition has blunted them. They have become background music.”
“Which is worse, overload or underload? Luckily, I never had to choose. One or the other would assert itself, rush or dribble through me, and pass on.”
Keepers
“Once we were on it, it was hard to get off. A bit like heroin, except it was the staff who got addicted to our taking it.”
“They were living out lives we might have been living, if we hadn’t been occupied with being mental patients.”
Nineteen Sixty-Eight
“We’d cheer them on, those little people on our TV screen.”
“– and then, they got locked up with their rages and rebellions.”
Bare Bones
“As long as we were willing to be upset, we didn’t have to get jobs or go to school. We could weasel out of anything except eating and taking our medication.”
“I poked deeper, to feel the bones. They were hard to find.”
“It was like a wall of water, strong but soft.”
“… now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.”
The Shadow of the Real
“I looked at the trees and said nothing, and he looked at me and said nothing. It was companionable.”
Stigmatography
“Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun.”
My Diagnosis
“The idea of suicide worked on me like a purgative or a cathartic.”
“I wasn’t convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was.”
Girl, Interrupted
“Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did.”