Susanna Kaysen Quotes

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.

...We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.

No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.

Let me alone, and go in search of someone else.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

We decided that sooner or later you had to learn to live without almost everybody, at least for a while. Even people you didn't think you could live without." p 167 love always found itself again.

I am ready to be alone.

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

Selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in letting go.

When I'm all alone, nobody else can say goodbye.

NORA: I must stand on my own two feet if I'm to get to know myself and the world outside. That's why I can't stay here with you any longer.

The price for independence is often isolation and solitude.

And I am in retirement from love.

True individuality can be lonely.

I remove my wedding rings and put them in the jewelry box. So many others have done this. I am not the only one. I am not the only one. But here, I am the only one.

I am what I am,' Salander said 'I ran away from everything and everybody. I should have said goodbye.

I am more exempt and more distant than any man in the world.

Be able to live alone, even if you don't want to and think you will never find it necessary.

A person needs at intervals to separate himself from family and companions and go to new places. He must go without his familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.

Remember we're all in this alone.

My sister is older than me and would often go off, so I grew up alone in a sense. I had to amuse myself and developed a wonderful fantasy world and quite happily lived in it. I think, in adulthood, that helped me. I love pottering on my own.

All my habits through life have been singularly removed from any condition of reliance on others, and the feeling - right or wrong - that aloneness is my proper position has prevailed since my early childhood, no doubt nourished and strengthened by many and quick-following bereavements.

My real guru are my experiences in life - the realisation that you are alone in this world came very early to me.

… splendid isolation

I think that all the time I lived alone changed me.