Quotes from Elizabeth Wurtzel

How could I let anybody see me this way? How could I expose other people to my person, to this bane to the world? I was one big mistake.

She wanted the pain to be over really quickly in this case too, but she seemed to think that ignoring it would make it go away (Band-Aids sometimes do fall of by themselves).

You see, I tell myself, here is the reason to stay clean: because life is so ridiculous, and if you're sober, it's funny; if you're high, it's just depressing. Or maybe it's the opposite. But I hope not.

It is hard to get back what is lost. It is more difficult still to begin anew.

I don't want anyone feeling sorry for me. About anything. Don't apologize unless you have done something wrong. It is nasty to feel sorry for anyone for any reason because it pushes her away.

I kept imagining the end, the despair I would suffer when it came, and it made any happiness I had in the present seem not merely ephemeral, but doomed. Because the happier I allowed myself to be now, the more miserable I would be later.

Cancer is an ecosystem. It is a crime spree.

Our suffering is small compared to our misunderstandings with others, how they fail to give us a break, know what it's like, judge us fairly, see the world the way we do.

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.

A woman who can handle a dog is pretty damn cool. If she can take care of such a demanding creature, most likely she can take pretty good care of herself.

I tell each of them whatever it is I think they want to hear because it is the only way to guarantee that either of them will love me. Insofar as a truth existed for me, it changed depending on whether I was with my mom or my dad.

We will very 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.

He could be good to talk to sometimes, but his actual efforts on my behalf added up to a whole lot of nothing. Every time I realized how little he would actually do for me as a father, how indifferent he was to parenting basics like buying me clothes or getting me to school on time or running me over to dance class, my misery was compounded. I could see that he might have understood me better than my mom did, but he really didn't love me as devotedly.

my gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world.

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. as it happens, i come from a family where no one every hesitated to vent whatever petty grievances she might have, and it's like living in a war zone.

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.

we jews do not have a concept of unconditional love. the god of the old testament is judgmental, jealous, and vengeful. he gets mad and he gets even. the notion of turning the other cheek, the idea that faith is more important than deeds, these are distinctly christian concepts.

some say that the difference between catholic guilt and jewish guilt is that the former emanates from the knowledge that we are all born already fallen, that there is nothing we can ever do to overcome the original sin; the latter springs from a sense that every one of us was created in god's image and has the potential for perfection. so catholic guilt is about impossibility, while jewish guilt is about an abundance of possibility.

I'm a stranger wherever I go because I'm strange to myself. My mind just goes off doing its own thing, never consulting me at all about whether it's all right to feel this way or that.

But in the end, after the curtain dropped over these little dramas, they all seemed able to go back to their rooms and back to their lives, they all seemed to know that it was just a game, that it scuffed you up and wore you out a little, but that you would get on with it. Only I seemed to be left behind, crying and screaming about wanting more, wanting my money back, wanting some satisfaction, wanting to feel something. I was the only person going to a prostitute in search of true love.

motherhood must be like that. it is probably the only experience most women ever have of ownership and domination.

I was born with a mind that is compromised by preternatural unhappiness, and I might have died very young or done very little. Instead, I made a career out of my emotions.

Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself.

When would I stop wondering what right—what nerve—I had to be depressed? Enough with this going on about all my blessings. I was starting to sound like a character in a TV movie with a title like The Best Little Girl in the World or Most Likely to Succeed.