# Quote — Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

> I've gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen. The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other -- the lady and her maid, the soldier, and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light -- that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light. Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. 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. The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.

- Author: [Susanna Kaysen](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susanna-kaysen.md)
- Book: [Girl, Interrupted](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susanna-kaysen/girl-interrupted.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Susanna_Kaysen#Girl,_Interrupted_(1994)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/susanna-kaysen/girl-interrupted/ive-gone-back

## More from this book

> When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susanna-kaysen/girl-interrupted/when-women-are.md)

> The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore; far from it. Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people—some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night. Then came the period when people we knew—not knew personally, but knew of—started falling to the ground: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Was that more alarming? Lisa said it was natural. “They gotta kill them,” she explained. “Otherwise it’ll never settle down.”

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susanna-kaysen/girl-interrupted/the-world-didnt.md)

> Is this the type of friend or lover I want to have? I ask myself every time I meet someone new. Charming but shallow; good-hearted but a bit conventional; too handsome for his own good; fascinating but probably unreliable; and so forth. I guess I've had my share of unreliable. More than my share? How many would constitute more than my share?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/susanna-kaysen/girl-interrupted/is-this-the.md)