Susanna Kaysen; Girl, Interrupted

• I know what it’s like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can’t. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.
• Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.
•  With wild eyes that had seen freedom
•  As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have 
• “I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.
•  The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world.
• When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it. 
• Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression. isn't there some other way to look at this? After all, angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well fed, clothes, and housed to have time for this much self-pity. 
• I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
• It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of
  warm earth. Suicide weather. 

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” — Zora Neale Hurston

“When you have cancer, people send flowers; when you lose your mind, they don’t." -Elyn R. Saks

“I think too much. I think ahead. I think behind. I think sideways. I think it all. If it exists, I’ve fucking thought of it.”  -Winona Ryder

“My father had taught me to be nice first, because you can always be mean later, but once you’ve been mean to someone, they won’t believe the nice anymore. So be nice, be nice, until it’s time to stop being nice, then destroy them.” -

Laurell K. Hamilton

“But…as bad as it was, I learned something about myself. That I could go through something like that and survive. I mean, I know it could have been worse—a lot worse— but for me, it was all I could have handled at the time. And I learned from it.” -Nicholas Sparks, Dear John 

“You will never be happy if you continue to hold on to the things that make you sad."

“You tried to change, didn’t you? Closed your mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less volatile, less awake…You can’t make homes out of human beings. Someone should have already told you that.”
— Warsan Shire