Top 100 Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes
#1. Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#11. 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
#12. Affection as medicine is highly overrated ... a person who is as sick with depression as I most certainly was cannot possibly be rescued through the power of anyone's love.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#28. I was scared of the way I felt as I ran away, knowing that if I stopped, I might have to confront the reason I was always running - and I'd have to admit that there was no reason. Run, run, run. Was it toward something or away from something else?
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. If you already know what your response will be before you've heard what the other person has said, you are not listening.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#34. 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
#35. But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. If you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#42. The most likely person to kill you is your wife, but that probably won't happen. What probably will happen is a million little betrayals of varying degrees of pain, brought on by people you love, the only ones who really can hurt you.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#43. The voices in my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#44. What makes you think i'm so rich you can steal my heart and i won't feel a thing?
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#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. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#56. If only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#57. I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#58. 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
#59. I hated him for not being depressed. He seemed a fool
everyone who didn't feel like me was a fool. I alone knew the truth about life, knew that it was all a miserable downward spiral that you could either admit to or ignore, but sooner or later we were all going to die.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#60. It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#61. I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#63. I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes; that is that, and I am heartbroken to live through a time where Wall Street money means these women are not treated with due disdain.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. I'm not crying because you're mean. I just can't imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#73. Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#74. A deeply true, wholly aching account of the dangerous way we live now
LOVE JUNKIE is great fun to read, and finally fully redemptive. Rachel Resnick brings a light, delightful touch to a hard subject, and creates a great, relatable, readable memoir.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#75. All I want to talk about is the oncoming apocalypse in my brain.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#76. 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
#77. I dont know if im running because i'm scared or if i'm scared because i'm running.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#79. 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
#80. I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#81. 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
#82. And then, if I die anytime soon, at least they'll be able to say that I led a productive life and did all my work on time. I may be dead, but I'll be up to date in Space, Time, and Motion.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#83. No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#84. I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#87. Because trying to see all sides, such an instinct is particularly Jewish.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Years of depression have robbed me of that - well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#91. People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#95. I don't know what to do if I am not inspiring some sort of false fascination.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#96. After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#97. In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I can remember neing in high school, walking through Central Park on a chilly day, and the sound of stamping on the crispness of autumn leaves would make me think of the sensation of my head cracking open. And I would get really scared and run all the way home, running for cover.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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