Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

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

I can remember neing in high school, walking through Central Park on a chilly day, and the sound of stamping on the crispness of autumn leaves would make me think of the sensation of my head cracking open. And I would get really scared and run all the way home, running for cover.

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

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.

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.

I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.

If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking

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

It is so hard to learn to put sadness in perspective so hard to understand that it is a feeling that comes in degrees, it can be a candle burning gently and harmlessly in your home, or it can be a full-fledged forest fire that destroy almost everything and is controlled by almost nothing. It can also be so much in-between

I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it.

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead

...occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?