A Quote by Susanna Kaysen

And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range?
A lot of people think it's insane to swim out in blue water with a great white shark, but my experience tells me I can do it safely. Other people might consider it mad, granted, but then I might think what they do is mad.
We're at a time now where there's a lot more "I'll do whatever it takes" attitude. I'm not going to say or do what you want me to say or do just because it might help me or be the politically correct thing to do to help my career. And that may have hurt me sometimes. I think about different collaborations that have been brought my way - it might have meant I'd get to be on TV to do certain things, but I've said, "No. It doesn't make sense. I'm not doing it." And other people might jump at the opportunity.
Any material can be treated in any number of ways. Sometimes I might hear something, or someone else might hear something, and say, "Wow, that sounds like classical music." Somebody else might think it sounds like a slow jam.
We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.
You've got to think ahead from what you're about to say. I might be mad at some guy but if I say what's on my mind, it's probably not going to be good.
If someone does something that makes me mad, well, chances are it'll probably make other people mad if I do it, too. I like to think, 'What's the meanest thing, the rudest thing I can say right now?' Or how can I completely discredit someone? That's just my mentality.
I love The End of the Batman story. I have my original copy, the hardcover, at my house from when I was a kid, whenever that was,'88 or '89. It was very influential to me because it was so explicit in touching on the notion that Batman might be mad and that he might belong in the mad house.
You can’t say ‘if this didn’t happen then that would have happened’ because you don’t know everything that might have happened. You might think something’d be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You can’t say ‘If only I’d…’ because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, you’ll never know. You’ve gone past. So there’s no use thinking about it.
And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.
How can I look at it and say, there it is - it's real. This is what is happening. It might even be a catalyst for more personal growth for me. It might be a blessing in disguise. It might not be. What's my best course of action? How can I be skillful?
People feel better because Donald Trump says all kinds of things no one else would say and we get certain tendencies out of our system. So if attacking immigrants, say, is a substitute for doing something worse, there's at least a scenario under which that's a better alternative than something else that might have happened.
No matter how much you love someone, on a bad day, you could say something terrible. All of the little things that you are saving to say, that you're mad about but never express, sometimes come out, all at once. We all have these terrible moments. That's just part of being human.
O God, I love you to the edge of madness, Venetia, but I'm not mad yet--not so mad that I don't know how disastrous it might be to you--to us both! You don't realize what an advantage I should be taking of your innocence!
I can't stay mad very long. I get grumpy when I read a bad review. I say, 'How could he say that about my music?' Then I forget about it. If I got mad every time somebody wrote something negative about me, I'd be exploding all the time. I'd be burned out just from reading reviews.
I had to learn not to let anyone push me around, to be brave and to say things I knew might make people mad.
Something keeps me moving forward, though. A lifetime of watching the Hunger Games lets me know that certain areas of the arena are rigged for certain attacks. And that if I can just get away from this section, I might be able to move out of reach of the launchers. I might also then fall straight into a pit of vipers, but I can't worry about that now.
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