Hospitalization Quotes

“It never stopped, even at night, it was our lullaby. It was our metronome, our pulse. It was our lives measured out in doses slightly larger than those famous coffee spoons. Soup spoons, maybe? Dented tin spoons brimming with what should have been sweet but was sour, gone off, gone by without our savouring it: our lives”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, But now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.”
― Stevie Smith, Selected Poems of Stevie Smith

“Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove their own sanity. Once one member of the family is hospitalized, it becomes easier for the rest of the family to distance themselves from the problem and to create a clear boundary between the sane and the insane. Recognizing a family member or friend as insane makes others around them, says Kaysen, compare themselves to that individual. Hospitalization allows for distance from this questioning of self that makes us so uncomfortable. Her view that mental illness often includes the entire family means the hospitalized family member becomes an excuse for other family members not to look at their own problems. This explains the willingness to pay the high financial costs of hospitalization.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night.
Only shifts.
Only waiting.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I found it fascinating that there could be so many realities. There was the truth, which was the world we lived. There was also the worlds we would create for ourselves in our minds. In truth, there are countless universes and realities hiding within all of mankind.”
― Melissa C. Water, Lady Injury

“The worst thing that can befall a family is to have its mother in hospital. The entire world becomes disoriented, the home has lost its heartbeat, there is no answer when you call.

[Victoria, 'Magic Might Happen']”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, A Place Like Home: Short Stories

“Une nouvelle fois, c'est l'accueil d'un hôtel sept étoiles dans les locaux d'un Formule 1.”
― Mathias Malzieu

“A few shackles and bars and this place'd be forced to call itself a prison!”
― Jennifer Anne Kogler, The Death Catchers

“Are you in there? If not here, then where'd you go?
They say the living are on Earth and the dead are out,
But where are those trapped in-between high and low?
Where exactly are you wandering about?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, Can I Tell You Something?

“While she was willing to give him a chance to repair her, she remained secretly unconvinced that she was worth the trouble. When the nurses said she was lucky to be alive, she thought the opposite was true. She felt unlucky to have failed.”
― Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

“... now I had nothing to fear. 'The worst is over for you,' they had said.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings