Susanna Kaysen Quotes

Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.

I look crazy, but I'm not. And the funny thing is, that other people don't look crazy, but they are.

Oh yes! The one man in the world who never believes he's mad is the madman.

Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.

A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.

The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

Well, you know what they say in Hollywood - the most important thing is being sincere, even if you have to fake it.

Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

What lies behind appearance is usually another appearance.

As far as I can see, it's not important that we have free will, just as long as we have the illusion of free will to stop us going mad.

I always see that there's a - from a philosophical point of view - there's the appearance of things that everybody wants you to think is happening, then there's the reality underneath it.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the 'fronts' people assume before one another's eyes, and the 'front' a writer puts on the face of reality.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Image is what people perceive my life to be. It's nothing like the truth.

I'm really good at pretending.