Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Pain or not, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it? Couldn't talk and thoughts of suicide be considered a whole malady of their own, a special subcategory of depression in which the loss of a will to live has not quite been displaced by a determination to die?”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“I become one of those people who walks alone in the dark at night while others sleep or watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns or pull all-nighters to finish up some paper that's due first thing tomorrow. 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 want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“You’re going to leave me, aren’t you? … You’ve had enough of me, haven’t you? You’re probably so tired of all this crying and all these moods, and I’ve got to tell you, so am I. So am I. Sometimes it seems like my mind has a mind of its own, like I just get hysterical, like it’s something I can’t control at all. And I don’t know what to do, and I feel so sorry for you because you don’t know what to do either. And I’m sure you’re going to leave me now.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal-unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“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.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions--showing up at work, paying the bills--you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge sadness in ourselves or those close to us--better known these days as denial, is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window, you don't have a problem.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I'm still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothing's changed.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“And I want out of this life on drugs.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“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.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of ‘keeping away from the dope.’ But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“It didn’t and doesn’t turn out well. There is no happy ending to the story of sorrow if you are born with a predilection for despair. The world is, after all, a coarse and brutal and cruel place. It’s only a matter of how long you can live with it.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“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”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“It's like Samson and Delilah: watch your back, because trouble could be the person you're sleeping with.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“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.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“Banned! My eyes light up, I think I see stars. Anything that has been banned by anyone must be something I’d like.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“The desire to be seen as superior and singular- and, conversely, but similarly, inferior and individual, is a big topic...They have a term for the syndrome- it is called terminal uniqueness...we all refuse to be part of the crowd, to walk in the middle of the road in the safety of others. We all think were special. But the problem is, as I point out to Dr. Singer all the time, I actually am special.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“I’ve been looking for a feeling like that everywhere I go. I’ve been waiting for someone to see all the good in me at every truck stop and intersection along the way. I’ve been waiting all my life for the moment to arrive when I can just stop. Stop looking”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel -
“I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.”
-- Elizabeth Wurtzel
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