# Quote — Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

> “The person often experiences this instability of self-image as chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom.” My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous. A partial list follows. I could not and did not want to: ski, play tennis, or go to gym class; attend to any subject in school other than English and biology; write papers on any assigned topics (I wrote poems instead of papers for English; I got F’s); plan to go or apply to college; give any reasonable explanation for these refusals.

- 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/the-person-often

## 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)