Promising Young Women Quotes

“The mornings were the worst. Roger told me this was Classic Depressive. He said that mornings were generally the most trying part of the day for a Classic. As Roger spoke, I would think of all the people everywhere, all over the world, who managed to get out of bed every morning. One morning after another morning. All that getting out of bed. All those people. And then I imagined those same people all leaving the house—actually going somewhere—maybe even without thinking about it.The progress of days. All the lives in all those days. I remember wondering how it was done. As if I wasn’t implicated…Roger told me that this train of thought, too, was Classic. I wondered if he meant to be comforting.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“Still she speaks to me as if I am her judge, or confessor. I felt so lonely hearing her stories, because I know they are about her and her issues and her judges and have nothing to do with me. I nod, sip my tea, thinking about how hard it is to truly connect with another human being.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“There is a freedom that comes with abandonment.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I sort of laughed when I saw myself. Back then, each time I looked in the mirror was a revelation; I hadn't gotten used to my looks, and the image in the mirror seemed to be shifting constantly, revising itself.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“You have to see this,” he said.

For the rest of my life, the men I loved or would love—it was always this way: *You must read/see/listen to/ think about this*.

And I would. Read or watch or listen or think. It was one way of becoming the person I wanted to be.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“The most important things are the things no one can talk about. The most important things, the things we need to say and need to know, are the things we can't say or know.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“Dymphna's talk of concentration camp survivors reminds you that you are super-privileged and self-absorbed and that really your suffering doesn't mean much by comparison.
'You have to choose how you respond to your own suffering. Everyone has to find meaning.'
'Everyone is full of shit,' you want to say, but you don't. You are learning not to say such things. This is what is meant by well-adjusted.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“Aren't all emotions problems? she wondered. No one spoke of how this might follow you; how it might alter the very shape and direction of your life. One you might regret pursuing. No one really spoke of this because they were part of a system that does not readily consider alternatives.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I could see she needed something he didn't have.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“She wasn't sure why she hated it so much. Maybe she hated the apartments they lived in. Or the way the laugh track would always sound after they said something that usually wasn't funny or real at all. She wondered how all the patients could watch the Friends without feeling completely betrayed and deeply sad and even more alone than they must already feel, as psych patients. If she took enough Ativan or Klonopin or Thorazine she could probably also watch Friends and tell herself that she liked it.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“Margaret, like Miriam, has a way of talking that is also a way of being in the world, somewhat independent of listener engagement.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“How do I know that when I talk about red you know what I'm talking about? That you are seeing the same color that I'm seeing? Or hen I talk abut something else, like being bored, that you know what I mean?”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“Later, a woman she loved said this was the first thing she did when she met a strong woman, an intense powerful woman, a woman who seemed unable to handle her own power: 'I look at their arms for scars.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“Roger called it reaction formation. That there was an earlier time and we’d reacted. That it all came down to adaptation and reaction. It was desire and its opposite. It was the anxiety of desire. He said that some of us had chosen unhealthy reactions. We’d become used to this. It became comfortable. You push someone away when you’d rather be close. You stop trying to please when all you want is to please.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“It hurt a little bit, but not as much as everyone says it will. It felt sort of uncomfortable and sort of strange. After not much time, he came, and he was still kissing me, and I was still not feeling much of anything when it was over. All that poetry, was all I could think. But maybe I also felt like it was my fault, that I had done something to ruin it. I had a way of explaining everything this way, back then.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I don’t think I understood what it meant to be happy or unhappy yet. I knew I wasn’t happy, of course; and it wasn’t that I didn’t feel—it was more that I didn’t know myself well enough to even know what my feelings were. If you can’t recognize your own sadness, for example, it becomes possible to transform it into something else, which is what I did. I read and I ran and I slept and I ate and I did things I didn’t want to do—”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I sort of laughed when I saw myself. Back then, each time I looked in the mirror was a revelation; I hadn’t gotten used to my looks, and the image in the mirror seemed to be shifting constantly, revising itself.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“The present need not be memory, Roger. The present can be the present. I used to live in the past—in memory—and that is why I suffered. I try not to suffer anymore, sir, and”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I saw the charts that noted what made a patient more or less likely to succeed. I read about the “unexpected failures.” According to the book the “unexpected failures” were those attractive, intelligent, promising young women who had, against all expectation, offed themselves in the years post-discharge.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“She walked with perfect posture and because of this I associated her with a sort of freedom that felt impossible. This association, of course, said a lot more about my relationship to my own body than it did about Heather. Who knows how she felt about her desired body? Did it feel like something separate from herself, as it did for me?”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“Oh, honey, you get to a point in life. I always hated that, what the older women would say, willing your capitulation.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“The way so much can’t be communicated, not even if we try very, very hard. That language starts to seem ridiculous, once you start noticing.” I’d tell him how earlier in the day maybe I had wanted to connect with someone but then by late afternoon I’d feel that thing inside me and it would all seem a waste of time.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I was too trapped in my own skull, that suffocating place, to really like anyone. I could dislike people—even hate them, yes—but that was usually because they’d made a way into my skull. And I wanted them out.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“The thing is when you’re sick or when they call you sick you start acting like that. I guess everyone knows that. But I didn’t know it, not until later. Not until I’d wasted a good part of my life in that place.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I am an empty thing. A fragmented mutating subject.” “No, you just feel that way,” they told me. “What’s the difference?”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I tried very hard to focus on Nick, on what he was saying, and all I could think was that maybe even when things got better, they could still get worse. I wanted to say something like that to Nick but I didn’t know how to say it. I lost the words. I thought about telling him that—about losing language. I wondered what he would say.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I'd tell him how earlier in the day maybe I had wanted to connect with someone but then by late afternoon I'd feel that thing inside me and it would all seem a waste of time.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“There is a kind of loneliness that comes from being with people. The kind that is more about a recognition of the failure of communication. The gaps.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“If you were the one who didn't know how to live, if you needed to be taught, we'd look away, too. We wouldn't want to know.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

“I guess it had to be the spring. I remember the oppressive way the sun would hit the windows at midday. I felt tragic, we all did, and the sun had a way of interfering with the narrative.”
― Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women