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?

We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat.

Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?

I laughed. “I guess my life will just stop when I get married.”

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

“See, the station wagon is the ego, sturdy and reliable, and the sedan is the superego, because it’s how you want to present yourself, powerful and impressive, and the sports car is the id—it’s the id because it’s irrepressible and fast and dangerous and maybe a little forbidden.”

My head was empty and I liked it that way.