Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

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

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Depression, Pain, Being Sad

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.55, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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

29 Copy quote
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

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.179, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

29 Copy quote
...if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Feels, Ifs

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.302, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

8 Copy quote
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

5 Copy quote
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

19 Copy quote
If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Depression, Fighting, Sinking

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.317, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Missing Someone, Always Trying, Long

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.82, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Morning, Sleep, Divorce

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Depression is a lot like that: slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearale. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getter older, about turning eight or about turning twelve or turning fifteeen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Morning, Heart, Thinking

15 Copy quote
I mean, if you were to find a shattered mirror, find all the pieces, all the shards and all the tiny chips, and have whatever skill and patience it took to put all that broken glass back together so that it was complete once again, the restored mirror would still be spiderwebbed with cracks, it would still be a useless glued version of its former self, which could show only fragmented reflections of anyone looking into it. Some things are beyond repair. And that was me.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Mean, Reflection, Self

8 Copy quote
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

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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How can you hide from what never goes away? --Heraclitus

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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...occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Suicide, Self Harm, Broken

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.77, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

35 Copy quote
Even if I remember the first time perfectly, I don't remember the beginning at all. I mean: the beginning of addiction. It's hard to say when it becomes a problem; it sneaks up on you like a sun shower.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Mean, Addiction, Firsts

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2007). “More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

8 Copy quote
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

Life, Stupid, Wish

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

11 Copy quote
It is so hard to learn to put sadness in perspective so hard to understand that it is a feeling that comes in degrees, it can be a candle burning gently and harmlessly in your home, or it can be a full-fledged forest fire that destroy almost everything and is controlled by almost nothing. It can also be so much in-between

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Depression, Home, Sadness

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.306, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

People, Problem, Terrible

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.235, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

13 Copy quote
It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Memories, Crazy, Past

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.81, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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I am so tired of the girl in the infirmary, I am so sick of the girl who cries wolf all the time - even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm. Not one of my pleas was ever less than truly urgent because when it's all in your mind, there always IS a wolf.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Girl, Tired, Sick

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.299, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion - assuming it was even real - hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grow up in an era of divorce are - in response to some atavistic instinct - still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Growing Up, Father, Real

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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

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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

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I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Love, Girl, Pain

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.214, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Summer, Crazy, Merit

Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Born: July 31, 1967
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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