This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been,...

All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.

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

Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated...

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...

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

She wasn’t blotto, she was plotting.

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

If I could have any job in the world I’d be a professional Cinderella.

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

The debate was wearing me out. Once you’ve posed that question, it won’t go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t. Anything I...

An observer can’t tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

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

Asa had a sharp understanding of the future–that is, a time when this would be past. Time was rushing through and around him, he almost heard it whistling, and this awareness rounded the world somehow...

Nothing,” I said. “It’s quiet. It’s like― I don’t know. It’s like falling off a cliff.” I laughed. “I guess my life will just stop when I get married.”It didn’t. It wasn’t quiet either. And...

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...

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...

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the...

I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn’t want to force anybody to want to.

I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove...

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...

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...

The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore.

Freedom was the price of privacy.