Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“… 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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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…”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

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

“They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.”

“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.”