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Quote by Susanna Kaysen

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

Quote by Susanna Kaysen

Book:Girl, Interrupted
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Girl, Interrupted

The story delves into the psychological and emotional journey of a young woman admitted to a psychiatric facility, offering insights into mental health and the complexities of human nature. more

Author

Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysen

Susanna Kaysen is an American author best known for her autobiographical novel 'Girl, Interrupted,' which is based on her own experiences at the McLean Hospital psychiatric ward in the early 1960s. more

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“She had killed and she had liked it, and he surely would have delighted to see her as she was now. Half-mad and fading fast, every inch the Gothic heroine that he’d envisioned. Ophelia, floating dead in the water and haunted by ghosts. Lilith, crafted from the earth instead of as a subjugate of the flesh, drawn to the fiercely blazing beauty of an angel only to find that the brilliant light singed as cruelly as the fires of hell. A fallen woman, drawn to her Lucifer. A cautionary tale to those who refused to bend to the natural order and fell in love with the wrong kind of man.”

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Book:Escape
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“But we must not do this often, in case the mind acquires a bad habit; yet at times it must be stimulated to rejoice without restraint and austere soberness must be banished for a while. For whether we agree with the Greek poet that ‘Sometimes it is sweet to be mad,’ or with Plato that ‘A man sound in mind knocks in vain at the doors of poetry,’ or with Aristotle that ‘No great intellect has been without a touch of madness,’ only a mind that is deeply stirred can utter something noble and beyond the power of others. When it has scorned everyday and commonplace thoughts and risen aloft on the wings of divine inspiration, only then does it sound a note nobler than mortal voice could utter. As long as it remains in its senses it cannot reach any lofty and difficult height: it must desert the usual track and race away, champing the bit and hurrying its driver in its course to a height it would have feared to scale by itself.”

InspirationPoetryMadnessWineIntellect
Book:On the Shortness of Life
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“Now, Mesnilgrand saw himself come to full maturity without the great military career that he had hoped for, his sword rusting in its scabbard, his feelings swelling up into the bitterest kind of rage. [...] An ingenious moralist, preoccupid by how illogical our destinies appear to be, once explained it by hypothesizing that men are like portrairs: the ones who have only their head and shoulders depicted seem larger than they could really have been in life, while others practically disappear, shrunken and reduced to looking like dwarves by the absurd size of their portrait's frame. [...] Back then, people thought he would either kill himself or go mad. He did not kill himself, and his mind stayed whole. He did not go mad. But then, that was because he was mad already, said the jokers—for there are always jokers. But although he did not kill himself—and, given his nature, his comrades chose not to ask him why he did not—he was not the kind of man to let his heart be eaten by a vulture without at least trying to break the vulture's beak.”

MadnessSuicideRevengeRageDissatisfactionDissapointment
Book:Les Diaboliques
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