Susanna Kaysen Quotes

If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison.

I've got one of those over-stuffed leather chairs from the Pottery Barn. It faces north. I live in San Francisco, so there's the Golden Gate Bridge off to the left, and there's Alcatraz off to the right, and I've got a pile of pulp fiction next to me, and there's usually a decent bottle of red wine next to the fireplace.

When the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a "holding" room that adjoins the witness room. There are two cells in this "holding" room, two, in case it's a double execution. They're ordinary cells, just like this one, and the prisoner spends his last night there before his execu­tion in the morning, reading, listening to the radio, playing cards with the guards.

Only a prisoner who has been confined for long behind high walk can appreciate the extraordinary psychological value of these outside walks and open views.

The guns on the walls that surround the prison accurately, though unwittingly, index the true character of the penitentiary in our day.

Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

I have long argued that we need to reopen Alcatraz to house government criminals, and let tourists on excursion boats in San Francisco Bay pay to chum the water with meat with an expired sell-by date that would otherwise have to be discarded.

They wanna censor me, they ratha see me in a cell, livin' in hell, with only a few of us to live to tell.

What I know for sure is that what you give comes back to you. That's not just my theory or point of view, it's physics. Life is an energy of giving and receiving... Those that are greedy, hit a road block where they are alone. Give more than you receive and be grateful for those around you.

I'm inventing new principles. The audience has a point of view that no one can predict.

It does not matter what name you attach to it, but your consciousness must ascend to the point through which you view the universe with your God-centered nature. The feeling accompanying this experience is that of complete oneness with the Universal Whole... This God-centered nature is constantly awaiting to govern your life gloriously. You have the free will to either allow it to govern your life, or not to allow it to affect you. The choice is always yours!

Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome; in San Francisco in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather.

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.

One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.

Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.

Wherever we direct our view, we discover the melancholy proofs of our depravity; whether we look to ancient or modern times, to barbarous or civilized nations, to the conduct of the world around us, or to the monitor within the breast; whether we read, or hear, or act, or think, or feel, the same humiliating lesson is forced upon us.

Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. We do not see IT in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted.

I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.

Michael Flynn not exactly cut from that cloth. Someone who has very strong views about almost everything in the realm of national security and defense.

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.

In terms of what is the solution is going forward, in my view, it is the grassroots human-rights groups - both Israeli and Palestinian - that are doing exactly what needs to be done, which is building trust, developing relationships and building that sense of common community which is essential if we're going to figure out how to move forward.

Keep one thing in view forever- the truth; and if you do this, though it may seem to lead you away from the opinion of men, it will assuredly conduct you to the throne of God.

[ Gil Cates] said, "You've got a point of view with your magic. There's this comedy to it, there's drama. You're telling stories with magic."

The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good.