Elizabeth Wurtzel citations

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”