Top 174 Quotes & Sayings by Elizabeth Wurtzel - Page 3

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.

I need someone to shut off my brain, and turn on my heart.

Belief is a good thing in principle, but an annoying thing in human beings.

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.

The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.

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.

And I want out of this life on drugs.

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’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

I am crying over the elusive nature of love.

Ritalin abuse is a big issue in the US.

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.

If you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistantly, they then have nothing left except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming around in the gut, but so far down, so hidden, it's impossible to find.

I become one of those people who walks alone in the dark at night while others sleep or watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns or pull all-nighters to finish up some paper that's due first thing tomorrow. I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece. I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always.

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.

I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.

Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. Its so bad, its useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.

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.

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

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

Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.

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.

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.

...All I want to talk about is the oncoming apocalypse in my brain.

But just as a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little bit of energy, in the hands of someone hell-bent on suicide, is a very dangerous thing.

Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.

For all of my life I have needed more.

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.

Depression is all about if you loved me you would. As in, if you loved me you would stop doing your schoolwork, stop going out drinking with your friends on a Saturday night, stop accepting starring roles in theater productions, and stop doing everything besides sitting here by my side and passing me Kleenex and aspirin while I lie and creak and cry and drown myself and you in my misery.

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

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

But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.

And what I thought, every time I thought about my father, every time his name came up, was quite simply: I WANT TO KILL YOU. I wanted to be more mature, more reasonable, I wanted to have a big, fat, forgiving heart that could contain all this rage and still find room for kind, beneficent love, but I didn't have it in me. I just didn't.

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.

I guess I realize that I don't want to die. I don't want to live either, but-there really isn't anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it's easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it's going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy.

Very early in my life it was already too late.

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

Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest.

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.

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

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?

So many more cycles of elation of the first kiss, and devastation when it's over.

The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief.

Pick a man, any man. Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first twenty four hours.

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

A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight!

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.

And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. 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.