I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.

— Susanna Kaysen

I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure if that's true. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it.

— Susanna Kaysen

I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to, so I wouldn't want to force anybody to want to.

— Susanna Kaysen

Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove their own sanity. Once one member of the family is hospitalized, it becomes easier for the rest of the family to distance themselves from the problem and to create a clear boundary between the sane and the insane. Recognizing a family member or friend as insane makes others around them, says Kaysen, compare themselves to that individual. Hospitalization allows for distance from this questioning of self that makes us so uncomfortable. Her view that mental illness often includes the entire family means the hospitalized family member becomes an excuse for other family members not to look at their own problems. This explains the willingness to pay the high financial costs of hospitalization.

— Susanna Kaysen

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.

— Susanna Kaysen

Nothing," I said. "It's quiet. It's like― I don't know. It's like falling off a cliff." I laughed. "I guess my life will just stop when I get married." It didn't. It wasn't quiet either. And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way France lost Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. Furthermore, I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

— Susanna Kaysen

Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber. This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn’t see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

— Susanna Kaysen

Recovered. Had my personality crossed over that border, whatever and wherever it was, to resume life within the confines of normal? Had I stopped arguing with my personality and learned to straddle the line between sane and insane?

— Susanna Kaysen

She wasn't blotto, she was plotting.

— Susanna Kaysen

Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.

— Susanna Kaysen