Elizabeth Wurtzel famous quotes

Pain or not, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it? Couldn't talk and thoughts of suicide be considered a whole malady of their own, a special subcategory of depression in which the loss of a will to live has not quite been displaced by a determination to die?
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Suicide #Determination #Pain

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Depression #Pain #Being Sad

I become one of those people who walks alone in the dark at night while others sleep or watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns or pull all-nighters to finish up some paper that's due first thing tomorrow. I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece. I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Book #Sleep #Home

Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Depression #Fun #Lying

I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Giving Up #Giving #Scared

You’re going to leave me, aren’t you? … You’ve had enough of me, haven’t you? You’re probably so tired of all this crying and all these moods, and I’ve got to tell you, so am I. So am I. Sometimes it seems like my mind has a mind of its own, like I just get hysterical, like it’s something I can’t control at all. And I don’t know what to do, and I feel so sorry for you because you don’t know what to do either. And I’m sure you’re going to leave me now.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Broken Heart #Sorry #Tired

That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal-unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Pain #Sadness #Space

It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Depression #Gay #Rights

If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Depression #Fighting #Sinking

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Thinking #Long #Parent

The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Ideas #Wielding Power #Problem

That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Depression #Keys #Sight

The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions--showing up at work, paying the bills--you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge sadness in ourselves or those close to us--better known these days as denial, is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window, you don't have a problem.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Strong #Jobs #Sadness

When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I'm still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothing's changed.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Eye #Balls #Body

And I want out of this life on drugs.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Drug #Want #This Life

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Sleep #Night #Drug

The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Crazy #Thoughtful #People

Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Morning

Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of ‘keeping away from the dope.’ But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Mean #Simple #Dope

if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Whole Life

It didn’t and doesn’t turn out well. There is no happy ending to the story of sorrow if you are born with a predilection for despair. The world is, after all, a coarse and brutal and cruel place. It’s only a matter of how long you can live with it.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Long #Sorrow #Despair

Embrace fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Passion #Insane #Approval

It's like Samson and Delilah: watch your back, because trouble could be the person you're sleeping with.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Fake People #Sleep #Watches

Judaism will be enmeshed in pride and shame for as long as it endures. But to endure as a country, Israel must shun both these tendencies.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Country #Pride #Israel

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Sleep #Rooms

Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Rain #Fall #Littles

Banned! My eyes light up, I think I see stars. Anything that has been banned by anyone must be something I’d like.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Stars #Eye #Thinking

The desire to be seen as superior and singular- and, conversely, but similarly, inferior and individual, is a big topic...They have a term for the syndrome- it is called terminal uniqueness...we all refuse to be part of the crowd, to walk in the middle of the road in the safety of others. We all think were special. But the problem is, as I point out to Dr. Singer all the time, I actually am special.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Thinking #Safety #Special

I’ve been looking for a feeling like that everywhere I go. I’ve been waiting for someone to see all the good in me at every truck stop and intersection along the way. I’ve been waiting all my life for the moment to arrive when I can just stop. Stop looking
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Waiting #Feelings #Way

I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Disappointment #Self #Mind

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. Its so bad, its useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Jesus #Art #Pain

Depression is all about if you loved me you would. As in, if you loved me you would stop doing your schoolwork, stop going out drinking with your friends on a Saturday night, stop accepting starring roles in theater productions, and stop doing everything besides sitting here by my side and passing me Kleenex and aspirin while I lie and creak and cry and drown myself and you in my misery.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Lying #Drinking #Night

And it seemed hard to believe that these people who were so close to me couldn’t see how desperate I was, or if they could they didn’t care enough to do anything about it, or if they cared enough to do anything about it they didn’t believe there was anything they could do, not knowing—or not wanting to know—that their belief might have been the thing that made the difference.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Believe #Differences #Knowing

I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Dream #Tired #Black

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Memories #Grandmother #Past

I am sick of the girl who cries 'wolf' all the time. Even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Girl #Sick #Alarms

Very early in my life it was already too late.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Too Late

It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Heart #Brain #Needs

And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Mean #Confusing #Want

The voices in my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Taken #Thinking #Voice

That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Weather #Snow #Cyclones

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you've got all this great wisdom, you don't get to be young anymore.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Life Lesson #Giving #Age

Ritalin abuse is a big issue in the US.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Issues #Abuse #Ritalin

No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Stars #Pain #Noise

I know I can do so much more than this, I know that I could be a life force, could love with a heart full of soul, could feel with the power that flies men to the moon. I know that if I could just get out from under this depression, there is so much I could do besides cry in front of the TV on a Saturday night.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Heart #Moon #Night

You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Philosophical #Height #Matter

Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Years #Giving #Perspective

But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Worry #Crash #Landing

And what I thought, every time I thought about my father, every time his name came up, was quite simply: I WANT TO KILL YOU. I wanted to be more mature, more reasonable, I wanted to have a big, fat, forgiving heart that could contain all this rage and still find room for kind, beneficent love, but I didn't have it in me. I just didn't.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Father #Heart #Names

I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Book #Writing #Paper

I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Book #Writing

I start to feel like I can't maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Stupid #Wish #May

I'll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I'll feel that she's a politician, like she's got an agenda to get across and that she doesn't always say what's really true or exactly what she feels.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Agendas #Television #Politician

People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Depression #Ambition #Fighting

A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight!
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Sight #Long #Anticipation

I come from a family of screamers. If they are trying to express any emotion or idea beyond pass the salt, it comes in shrieks.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Ideas #Trying #Salt

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Thinking #Years #Finals

It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Book #Writing #Hair

I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes, that is that, and I am heartbroken to live through a time where Wall Street money means these women are not treated with due disdain.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Heartbroken #Wall #Believe

I need someone to shut off my brain, and turn on my heart.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Heart #Brain #Needs

Because trying to see all sides, such an instinct is particularly Jewish.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Trying #Sides #Instinct

But just as a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little bit of energy, in the hands of someone hell-bent on suicide, is a very dangerous thing.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Suicide #Suicidal #Hands

I guess I realize that I don't want to die. I don't want to live either, but-there really isn't anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it's easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it's going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Suicidal #Mean #Trying

Its the people you are close to, the ones who love you, the ones who have seen your heart, who have touched your soul - to them, it is obvious that something is wrong or missing. Your heart and soul are missing. They feel it. It hurts them. It kills them.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Love #Hurt #Heart

All I do is go to the movies.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Movie

You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Hate #Miserable

Sometimes I wish that there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after.
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Hurt #Morning #Mean

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel

#Girl #Space #Forever