Quotes from Elizabeth Wurtzel

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.

I am baffled by men. When they want me, I don't want them; when I want them, they don't want me.

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

Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning.

In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.

I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.

Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die.

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. The fog is like a cage without a key.

I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?

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.

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

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.

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.

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.

Very early in my life it was already too late.

Why do anything-- why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.

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

For all of my life I have needed more.

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.