Girl, Interrupted Quotes

“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, Girl, Interrupted

“Lisa's eyes, once so magnetic, now just look empty.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Five-minute. Fitfteen-minutes. Half-hour checks. Some nurses said, "Checks," when they opened the door. Click, turn the knob, swish, open the door, "Checks," swish, pull the door shut, turn the knob. Five-minute checks. Not enough time to drink a cup of coffee, read three pages of a book, take a shower.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Daisy had two passions: laxatives and chicken.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“The student nurses were about nineteen or twenty: our age. They had clean, eager faces and clean, ironed uniforms. Their innocence and incompetence aroused our pity, unlike the incompetence of aides, which aroused our scorn. This was partly because student nurses stayed only a few weeks, whereas aides were incompetent for years at a stretch. Mainly, though, it was because when we looked at the student nurses, we saw alternate versions of ourselves. They were living out lives we might have been living, if we hadn't been occupied with being mental patients. They shared apartments and had boyfriends and talked about clothes. We wanted to protect them so that they could go on living these lives. They were our proxies.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted