Susanna Kaysen

My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliterated—for a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around the theater to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head.

And after that? I asked her.

A lot of darkness, she said.

Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly

it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well.

Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

Why did she do it? Nobody knew. Nobody dared to ask.

We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.

more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it’s cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you’ve been planning, when you’ll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You’ll have to find another way.

“Just because I don’t sleep doesn’t mean I don’t rest.”

“There’s nobody to take care of you out there.”

“I’m not sad,” she explained to me, “but I can’t help crying”