Quotes from Elizabeth Wurtzel

It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

My life has been one long longing.

want out. No one will ever love me, I will live and die alone, I will go nowhere fast, I will be nothing at all. Nothing will work out. The promise that on the other side of depression lies a beautiful life, one worth surviving suicide for, will have turned out wrong. It will all be a big dupe.

And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. 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 is all I can say too.

I mean, if I were a rich kid with stable, self-sufficient parents whom I thought I could trust to attend to themselves and to me, and I were heading for a tailspin, I might feel free to let myself free-fall, knowing that someone else would provide a bottom upon which I might eventually bottom out. 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?

If only life could be more like the movies, where characters muddle through things and do what's right in the end. But real life isn't like that.

I know how taxing it is to do something even as small and brief as having a meal with a depressive. We are such irritating people, can see the dark side of everything, and our perpetual malcontentedness kind of ruins it for everybody.

life was one long distraction from the inevitable.

My improved affect did not in any way sway me from the philosophical conviction that life, at its height and at its depth, basically sucks.

Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was all right for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left.

I have had the same friends since college, although as time has gone on, the daily nature of those relationships has changed, such that it is not daily at all.

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.

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 wish I were shyly, quietly intriguing, like Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, like someone French and fashionable who knows how to twirl her ladylike locks just so and walk adroitly on kitten heels, who is all gesture and whisper - but I am unfortunately forward and forthright: When I am interested in a man, he absolutely knows it.

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.

I start to feel like I can't maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is.

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.

I made 'Prozac Nation' necessary reading because I write necessarily. I tell my story because it is about everyone else: in 1993, people took pills to relieve the pain just like they do now, but it scared them; it doesn't any more, because talk is not cheap at all - it is tender.

My life's actually been quite dull; it's not all that glamorous.

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.

Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left.

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.

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.

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.