Susanna Kaysen Quotes

I've always been a big fan of Philip K. Dick; I love his work. There's a returning theme of identity and the fragility of our identity. Even when we are looking at what we think is a stark reality, it might actually be something completely different.

You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.

I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building.

What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

I'm not sure I know what "normal" is.

It's hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream.

I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure that I was dreaming.

I think there was always that question mark of why am I not in St. Louis anymore? I think everybody had those questions and probably had those perceptions of me.

You think you're winning, but it's hard to say sometimes.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm thening or nowing.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

I don't know what 'normal' means, anyway.

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.