Alexandra > Alexandra's Quotes

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

“Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide. ”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“The world didn't stop because we weren't in it anymore.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”
― 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

“Twentyone is too old to go anywhere alone, you know that. I want to go with someone. I don't mean as a bride, I'm not so gauche as that, but as a mistress or paramour or concubine or companion or friend or pal or anything else. I just don't want to be left alone! I want to get out of here!" She said it again for all the wide-faced flowers to hear: "I want to get out of here!”
― Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall

“If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view. ”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

“Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Whoever controls the media, the
images, controls the culture.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I know too much and not enough”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Our heads are round so thought can change direction”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.”
― Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952

“If I had a soul I sold it
for pretty words
If I had a body I used
it up spurting my essence

Allen Ginsberg warns you
dont follow my path
to extinction”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“America, why are your libraries full of tears?”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?”
― Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road