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Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel is an American writer and journalist, known for publishing her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation, at the age of 26. She holds a BA in comparative literature from Harvard College and a JD from Yale Law School.

✵ 31. July 1967 – 7. January 2020
Elizabeth Wurtzel photo

Works

Prozac Nation
Prozac Nation
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Prozac Nation
Prozac Nation
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel: 51 quotes3 likes

Famous Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

“Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“One morning you wake up and are afraid you are going to live. In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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

Elizabeth Wurtzel Depressing quotes

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

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes about life

“Very early in my life it was already too late.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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 book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“For all of my life I have needed more.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Source: More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction

“if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Trending quotes

“I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

“I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“… 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

“… if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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 book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

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

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Hemingway has his classic moment in "The Sun Also Rises" when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, "Gradually, then suddenly." That's how depression hits. You wake up one morning, afraid that you're gonna live.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Variant: There is a classic moment in ‘The Sun Also Rises’ when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, “Gradually and then suddenly.” When someone asks how I lost my mind, that’s all I can say too.
Source: Prozac Nation

“I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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 book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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 book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“I am crying over the elusive nature of love.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“As soon as I was out in the street, I realized I didn't want to be alone after all, I realized I didn't want to be anything at all.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“But he does insist on a conversation. Goddamn it! Why can't people just do what I want them to do and be gone? It's a worldwide conspiracy to make me be polite when I don't want to be.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel

“My God, I could raise a family of six children and hold down a full-time job with all the energy I expend on depression!”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Doing nothing is opting for the sweetness of stillness… Instead of fighting with that which you cannot control, you might as well just see it through…”

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Source: Radical Sanity: Commonsense Advice for Uncommon Women

“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 book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“I sit there in my bed staring at the wall, feeling happy, enjoying the way the wall looks, how pink and how white it is. Pink and white, as far as I’m concerned, have never looked quite so pink and white before.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“The measure of 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.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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

“As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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

Source: More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction

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

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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 book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

“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

“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 book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

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