Girl, Interrupted

When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.

Suicide is a form of murder—premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to.

A person who doesn’t talk to herself or stare off into nothingness is therefore more alarming than a person who does.

Did the hospital specialize in poets
and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

life demanded skills I didn’t have. The result was chronic emptiness and boredom

I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it; even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself (“counteract feelings of ‘numbness’ ”). I was demonstrating, externally and irrefutably, an inward condition

If I who was previously revolting am now this far from my crazy self, how much further are you who were never revolting, and how much deeper your revulsion

Which is worse, overload or underload? Luckily, I never had to choose. One or the other would assert itself, rush or dribble through me, and pass on

Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness

course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence