Frasi di Susanna Kaysen (72 frasi) | Citazioni e frasi celebri

Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Contesto: Naked, we needed protection, and the hospital protected us. Of course, the hospital had stripped us naked in the first place—but that just underscored its obligation to shelter us. And the hospital fulfilled its obligation. Somebody in our families had to pay a good deal of money for that: sixty dollars (1967 dollars) a day just for the room; therapy, drugs, and consultations were extra. Ninety days was the usual length of mental-hospital insurance coverage, but ninety days was barely enough to get started on a visit to McLean. My workup alone took ninety days. The price of several of those college educations I didn’t want was spent on my hospitalization.

“I could not and did not want to: ski, play tennis, or go to gym class; attend to any subject in school other than English and biology; write papers on any assigned topics (I wrote poems instead of papers for English; I got F’s); plan to go or apply to college; give any reasonable explanation for these refusals.”

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Susanna Kaysen libro La ragazza interrotta

Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Contesto: “The person often experiences this instability of self-image as chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom.” My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous. A partial list follows. I could not and did not want to: ski, play tennis, or go to gym class; attend to any subject in school other than English and biology; write papers on any assigned topics (I wrote poems instead of papers for English; I got F’s); plan to go or apply to college; give any reasonable explanation for these refusals.

“My family had a lot of characteristics—achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations—that all seemed to be recessive in me.”

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Susanna Kaysen libro La ragazza interrotta

Origine: Girl, Interrupted (1994)

“Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”

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Susanna Kaysen libro La ragazza interrotta

Origine: Girl, Interrupted

“It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.”

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Susanna Kaysen libro La ragazza interrotta

Origine: Girl, Interrupted

““A writer,” I said, when my social worker asked me what I planned to do when I got out of the hospital. “I’m going to be a writer.” “That’s a nice hobby, but how are you going to earn a living?” My social worker and I did not like each other. I didn’t like her because she didn’t understand that this was me, and I was going to be a writer; I was not going to type term bills or sell au gratin bowls or do any other stupid things.”

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Susanna Kaysen libro La ragazza interrotta

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

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

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Susanna Kaysen

Susan Cheever, "A Designated Crazy," The New York Times Book Review, June 20, 1993. (Reviewing Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted.)
On Girl, Interrupted

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

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Susanna Kaysen

Origine: Girl, Interrupted (v českém překladu Narušení)

“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 be a child forever.”

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Susanna Kaysen libro La ragazza interrotta

Origine: Girl, Interrupted

“And the college business: My parents wanted me to go, I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t go. I got what I wanted. Those who don’t go to college have to get jobs. I agreed with all this. I told myself all this over and over. I even got a job—my job breaking au gratin dishes. But the fact that I couldn’t hold my job was worrisome.”

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Susanna Kaysen libro La ragazza interrotta

Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Contesto: And the college business: My parents wanted me to go, I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t go. I got what I wanted. Those who don’t go to college have to get jobs. I agreed with all this. I told myself all this over and over. I even got a job—my job breaking au gratin dishes. But the fact that I couldn’t hold my job was worrisome. I was probably crazy. I’d been skirting the idea of craziness for a year or two; now I was closing in on it.

“My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.”

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Susanna Kaysen libro La ragazza interrotta

Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Contesto: It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.