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…

- Susanna Kaysen

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 w…

- Susanna Kaysen

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 b…

- Susanna Kaysen

I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.

- Susanna Kaysen

When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy.

- Susanna Kaysen

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 d…

- Susanna Kaysen

Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.

- Susanna Kaysen

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the…

- Susanna Kaysen

My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

- Susanna Kaysen