Quotes from Elizabeth Wurtzel

What I mean is this: Prozac has rather minimal side effects, the lithium has a few more, but basically the pair keep me functioning as a sane human being, at least most of the time. And I can't help feeling that anything that works so effectively, that's so transformative, has got to be hurting me at another end, maybe sometime further down the road. I can just hear the words inoperable brain cancer being whispered to me by some physician twenty years from now.

All I would like in my life, what I wish for so very much is to someday… become one of those people who is better than the worst thing that happens to her.

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence in a long way.

I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic—I was the attic itself.

The best people are the ones you have to forgive for everything. You have no choice; it would be worse to live without them.

The idea of throwing away my depression, of having to create a whole personality, a whole way of living and being that did not contain misery as its leitmotif, was daunting.

I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

Cancer is a bully. It is an elephantine disease of body, mind, soul. My husband moved a half a mile away from it. I would love to do the same. I am stuck until the end.

I am a monotheist. I am in it for life. I am in everything for life. If you don't stop me, I will not stop myself. I have the kind of faith that you can only have if you have talked your way out of trouble all along.

Neurology takes a positive view toward god and prayer. And relinquishing, which is what god and prayer is about. It is always turning your will over to a higher power and letting the will of the world and not your extraordinary manipulations lead you to your desired result. I always say that, it is my constant prayer: god, if you are out there, watch over me and your will, not mine, be done. That is what will happen anyway, but I pray for release from the dreadful fight.

We will likely soon be living in a society that confuses disease with normal life if the panic and rush to judgement and labeling do not slow down a bit.

People talk about the way disembodied spirits roam the world with no place to park themselves, but all I can think is that I am a dispirited body, and I'm sure there are plenty of other human mollusk shells roaming around, waiting for some soul to fill them up.

Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.

Yes, there was a certain beautiful honesty to my depressed state—I miss it sometimes now. I miss having so little stake in maintaining the status quo that I could walk out of rooms in tears at times that other people would have deemed inappropriate. I liked that about myself. I liked that disregard for convention.

No man is going to solve my problems, no one can rescue me, because I am too sick.

We blame repressive times for the madness of Marilyn, we blame the excessive times for the schizophrenia of Zelda. . . . But finally, now, with Prozac . . . it is easy to pin the troubles of all these women in the past on bad chemistry.

You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.

And you know how it is with things that mean a lot to you. They get heavy. They drive you crazy. They make life worth living, they make life unliveable, you can't stay, you can't go, there's not enough tequila in all of Mexico to straighten out your mind, years go by and nothing ever changes. This face is one that will make you weak forever.

I think the closeness that you're able to experience when you're with Rafe is something you've been deprived of and something you've needed for so long that it's causing you to go to these extremes of emotion every time you feel him slipping away

But what if you are the only resting point you know of? What if you are absolute zero? What if only you can catch yourself?

I can't believe anyone might care enough to try to keep me alive. And then I realize that, yes, of course they would, but only because it is the thing to do. It's not about true caring. It's about not wanting to live with the guilt, the insult, the ugly knowledge that a suicide took place and you did nothing.

I mean, the reason I do drugs is because the world is so capricious and unpredictable. You do nice things, and people are mean in return, or you act like an ogre, and people are incredibly kind in response. Sometimes a plus b equals c, but lots of times it doesn't.

I believe there is an integrity to my intolerance...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?

kind of funny that you're high maintenance and difficult