Susanna Kaysen Quotes

I was very depressed when I was 19... I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

I had never felt so lonely and so sad in my entire life.

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

Oh, what a void there is in things.

I was so broken when I did the first record. I was living in my parents' basement, I didn't know anyone. I was broken-hearted and writing this really dark record. I was at the bottom of a well.

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

It's so dreadful to have nothing to love - life is so empty - and there's nothing worse than emptiness.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Wrap parties can be really sad, actually, disorienting.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.

Lonesome. Lonesome. I know what it means. Here all by my lonesome, dreaming empty dreams. Weary. Weary at the close of day, wondering if tomorrow brings me joy or sorrow.

Maybe I should quit the business. There's no one left for me to love. Mama's dead. Mr. Burns couldn't care less about me. What's left?

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.

Six is the hardest number for me to experience, the smallest. It's the absence of something - it's cold, dark, almost like a black hole. If someone tells me they are depressed, I might imagine myself in the hole of a six to help me empathise.

Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

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

I sat there with everything - and I had nothing.

I'm incapable of feeling any joy.

A big part of depression is feeling really lonely, even if you're in a room full of a million people.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone, It's not warm when she's away, Ain't no sunshine when she's gone, And she's always gone too long, Anytime she goes away.

People collect boredom, they hoard it, they wallow in it, hoping that one day it'll be of interest and become an effete ennui. Let me tell you, it doesn't.

There is nothing else to do in my life... I have no family, relationships - this is the only thing that I do.

If a documentary crew were to follow me around, they'd probably think they were making a film about the saddest person in the world.