Marzipan > Marzipan 's Quotes

“Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“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.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.

What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?

I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.

She lit the match.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… 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. They were not perfect, but they were my friends.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there. ”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“It is my belief that people who speak of high school with a sugary fondness are bluffing away early-onset Alzheimer's. ”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“It's not that you have lost touch with these people. You haven't. It's just that they have kept in such close touch with each other. When scrolling through your cell phone, you generally let their numbers be highlighted for a second, hovering, and then move along to people you have spoken to within the last month. It's not that you're a bad friend to these people. It's just that you're not a great one. They know the names of each other's coworkers and the blow-by-blow nature of each other's dramas; they go camping in the Berkshires together and have such sentences in their conversational arsenal as "you left your lip gloss in my bathroom." You have no such sentences. Your connection to your friends is half-baked and you are starting to forget their siblings' names, never mind their coworkers. But you're still in the play even if you're no longer a main character.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“The children were overwhelmingly morbid. Not a single adult asked me where butterflies go when they die, but this question was more popular than pixie sticks with the under-four-foot set. I cursed parents for not preparing their children. When I was five, my mother and sister sat me up on the kitchen counter and explained the facts of life: the Easter Bunny didn't exist, Elijah was God's invisible friend, with any luck Nana would die soon, and if I ever saw a unicorn, I should kill it or catch it for cash. I turned out okay.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“In my lame pescetarian defense, it's very hard to be a girl and say you won't eat something. Refuse one plate of bacon-wrapped pork rinds and you're anorexic. Accept them and you're on the Atkins. Excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and you're bulimic. Best to keep perfectly still and bring an IV of fluids with you to dinner.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Because this is the beauty of strangers: we're all just doing our best to help each other out, motivated not by karma but by a natural instinct to help the greater whole.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Hey there.' I cleared my throat. 'How are you?'
I'm engaged!'
Incidentally, this is an unacceptable answer to that question.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“When I was 14, a camp counselor explained what "eating out" was and I vowed to never have it done to me. It seemed cannibalistic and unhygienic. I also remember that she claimed--in front of an entire cabin of girls--to have been "eaten out" by one of the maintenance men in a hot tub. Under hot water. Either something is amiss in my memory of this conversation or she found the most talented man on the planet and all hope is lost for the rest of us.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“[He] is the worst kind of asshole they make - the kind who is completely oblivious to how he sounds, the kind who is impossible to argue with because he doesn't allow for a worldview outside of his own.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“The search for one's first professional job is not unlike a magical love potion: when one wants to fall in love with the next thing one sees, one generally does.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“But now my problems had been set loose. They could be anywhere at any time and I was just like everyone else I knew: almost positive that there was something profoundly and undiagnosably wrong with me.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“What annoyed me was that I so often attempted to weasel out of things on purpose, it killed me to do it by accident. It seemed like a waste of whatever detailed lie I was going to have to come up with.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“We all deserve to be congratulated, but sadly that would mean there's no one left to do the congratulating.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“It's remarkable the logic we'll build around a misapprehension.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“You can’t fall away from something if you were never there in the first place. It’s the difference between jumping off a cliff and passing out where you stand.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake

“Sometimes we don't know what we want until we don't get it. It's like meeting someone for the first time after hearing their voice on the phone- before you met them you'd have said you had no particular image of them; afterward, you inevitably say you imagined them looking different.”
― Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”
― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan