Top 100 Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes
#1. 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
#2. All I want to talk about is the oncoming apocalypse in my brain.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#3. I'm not crying because you're mean. I just can't imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#4. 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
#6. Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life you give 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
#7. And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can't equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#8. I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#9. Most people, using everything they have in real life, cannot take hold of you the way a talented writer can without even being there. Talent is the ability to mesmerize people when you are nowhere near. Talent is the ability to make something that is more stunning than human presence.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#11. 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
#12. I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#13. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#15. I am motivated to write because it is what I am meant to do. It is not a choice - it is what I am. I did not choose writing - it chose me. And I believe it is necessarily that way. Anyone doing this for some other reason should not be.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#17. Yes, the United States is still the great meritocracy it's always been; but now, if you aren't brilliant or beautiful or both, there isn't much to do, because they can do it cheaper in Shanghai or Mumbai.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#18. 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
#19. The men have piled up in my past, have fallen trenchantly through my life, like an avalanche that doesn't mean to kill but is going to bury me alive just the same.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#20. 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
#21. I'm a huge Springsteen fan, and yet if either he or Bob Dylan had to be erased from the world's hard drive, I would save Bob Dylan's work for sure - he's the greater talent, and by leaps and bounds and skyscrapers and rocket blasts. But Bob Dylan is an alien to his public.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#22. I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#23. 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
#24. There are all these things my mother is good for that my father isn't, and all these things my father is good for that my mother isn't, and if only they could work out their differences, or keep the dim of discord to a minimum, I could have two whole parents.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#26. I dont know if im running because i'm scared or if i'm scared because i'm running.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing, and I'd think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#30. Because, frankly, I have a tough time feeling that feminism has done a damn bit of good if I can't be the way I am and have the world accommodate it on some level.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#31. My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#33. Depression gave me extreme perspicacity; rather than skin, it was as if I had only thin gauze bandages to shield me from everything I saw.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#34. 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
#36. By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing, but I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security - kids you do or don't want, Tiffany silver you never use - that makes life complete.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#37. Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#38. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#42. 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
#43. Am I worried people will say I'm repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#44. That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#45. There are some remarks that are so stupid that to be even vaguely aware of them is the intellectual equivalent of living next door to Chernobyl.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#46. 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
#47. As it is my good fortune to be American, I live in the only country that as a matter of policy is pro-Israel regardless of party allegiance; Democrats and Republicans equally unite behind the blue-and-white.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#48. I admire Bruce Springsteen because he's a heroic person who has lots of integrity and has this incredible body of work that is so vital.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#49. Whether the emotion is true or truly wished for, anytime anything resembling love comes my way, it makes a fool of me. It
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#50. 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
#51. What makes you think i'm so rich you can steal my heart and i won't feel a thing?
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#52. Israel fights back, which is very much at odds with the Jewish instinct to discuss and deconstruct everything until action itself seems senseless.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#53. 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.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#54. 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
#55. Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on? ... I don't know the answer, I know only that I can't.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. If you want to see that human story unfold, if you want to understand that only the unexpected life is worth a damn, spend some time with 46 years of Lou Reed's work: music that leaped and then looked. Safety is for the godless and the faithless.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#59. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#60. Belief is a good thing in principle, but an annoying thing in human beings.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#61. 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
#62. A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight!
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#63. Sometimes someone will be standing in front of me, and already I feel him walking away. It's only a matter of time, so what's the point?
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#64. In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#65. Pass the pills and fancy plants/ Give us this day our daily trance.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#66. 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
#67. At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#68. Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#69. You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#71. Everything good takes a great amount of effort. Like, things went wrong with 'Prozac Nation' so much, and it went through so many rejections and incarnations, but I felt so much that it needed to exist. But if I hadn't been so persistent and insistent, it wouldn't have happened.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#72. My life's actually been quite dull; it's not all that glamorous.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#73. 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
#75. I have had the same friends since college, although as time has gone on, the daily nature of those relationships has changed, such that it is not daily at all.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#76. 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
#77. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labour somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#84. 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
#86. That I don't want to feel better in the morning, how that way of life is wearing me out, that what I really want is to not feel this way in the first place.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#90. It's like Samson and Delilah: watch your back, because trouble could be the person you're sleeping with.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#91. 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
#92. It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#93. 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
#94. He seemed a fool-everyone who didn't feel like me seems a fool.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#95. So many more cycles of elation of the first kiss, and devastation when it's over.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#96. 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
#97. Like, in high school, I was a good student and got straight As. It was very strict and you couldn't do well there unless you studied very hard, but every time there was any trouble, I was the first person they would be talking to.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#98. 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
#99. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#100. 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
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