Susanna Kaysen Quotes

The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.

For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin?

Prison's a walk in the park compared with being sectioned, mate, it really is.

I had, toward the last, been shut off from all visitors, and so when the lawyer, Peter A. Hendricks, came and told me that friends of mine were willing to take charge of me if I would rather be with them than in the asylum, I was only too glad to give my consent.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within the Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens—chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.

Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.

Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.

This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.

The way the neurotic sees it: bars on his door mean that he's locked in; bars on your door mean that he's locked out.

A man who will not leave his room because he does not know how, or is afraid to open the door, is trapped just the same whether or not the door is locked.

Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

I've not been able to avoid periods of time where I felt super-lonely. Luckily, I have a side that is able to always see the glass as half-full.

Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool no where but in's own house.

They seal the subway change-booth guy up inside this thing with bullet-proof glass, closed in on all sides, it's like some kind of Houdini torture tank of doom. How do you breathe in there? It looks like if you put your hand over the change slot, you could suffocate him in thirty seconds.

And if that weren't bad enough, the next sound he heard was a loud click. The damned woman had locked him out. She'd taken all the food and locked him out. "You'll pay for this!" he yelled at the door. "Do be quiet," came the muffled reply. "I'm eating.

As you would expect, the loss of freedom and the lack of privacy are extremely difficult... I want you to know that I am well. I am safe, fit and healthy.

Once in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the freedom that exists in the world of madness and becomes addicted to it. You no longer have to take on responsibilities, to struggle to earn your daily bread, to be bothered with repetitive, mundane tasks. You could spend hours looking at a picture or making absurd doodles. Everything is torelated because, after all, the person is mentally ill.

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.

I built a jail in my closet and I would incarcerate my family from time to time.

Thoughts shut up want air, And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

He's right: They have to put madmen with madmen.