Susanna Kaysen Quotes

I think it's my job or the artist's job, to try and find some solution or some reason to accept things. But given the grimmest reality, I feel the grimmest facts are the real facts, the true facts: that you're born, you die, you suffer, it's to no purpose, and you're gone forever, ever, ever, and that's it.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It's neither death nor life that I want.

It's really easy to slide into a depression fueled by the pointlessness of existence.

Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

But for what purpose was the earth formed?" asked Candide. "To drive us mad," replied Martin.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

Life is absolutely unbearable. And we're going to die.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.

How hard could it be? Is it really going to hurt? You get into that deep well of emotion if you are by yourself. Why am I here? What's the point of going on? If I can't do what I want to do, then what's the point?

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life, for lots of people.

That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.

We don't understand why we're here, no one's giving us an answer, religion is vague, your parents can't help because they're just people, and it's all terrible, and there's no meaning to anything.

Living, it's awful for me.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

If I was to say I had a life, that would be a lie.

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.