Quotes by 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.

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 Im still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothings changed.

They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.

If I were another person, I go on, I wouldn’t want to deal with me, I don’t want to deal with me, It’s so hopeless, I want out of this life. I really do. I keep thinking that if I could just get a grip of myself, I could be all right again. I keep thinking I’m driving myself crazy, but I swear, I swear to God, I have no control. It’s so awful, It’s like some demons have taken over my mind. And nobody believes me, Everybody thinks I could be better if I wanted to. But I can’t be the old Lizzy anymore, I can’t be myself anymore, I mean, actually, I am being myself right now and it’s horrible.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.

How can you hide from what never goes away?

Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting,too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

Experience, which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally Ive found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; experience, which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; experience, which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life...if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure...make you a more capable lover and friend, spouse and partner.

As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.

Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.

There are all these things my mother is good for that my father isnt, and all these things my father is good for that my mother isnt, and if only they could work out their differences, or keep the dim of discord to a minimum, I could have two whole parents.

I dont think it matters how many parents youve got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.

I dont think it matters how many parents youve got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence in a long way.

When she walks in that first Monday, of course I am awake - I am always up these days - I decide to lay it down. “Look”, I say, “I snort Ritalin. That’s what I do. I snort it all day long. I crush up the pills and inhale them like cocaine. I’m up to about forty a day. I can’t stop. I am planning to get help, to check into rehab or something like that, as soon as this book is finished. In the meantime, I can’t stop, and I am not going to.” She looks at me impassively. “I don’t care what you think about it. So you have a choice. I can sit here and do it in front of you, or I can keep running into the bathroom so you don’t have to see. Either way, it’s going to happen, so it’s just about how bad it’s going to make you feel to watch.”She doesn’t seem to know what to say. She stares. I think she is going to cry. I think she wants to give me a hug, maybe, but there is an invisible cage, a delicate netting of glass, an ice sculpture surrounding me that no one can walk through. I’m cold. I’ve frozen into someone who just can’t be touched. I dare you to try.

Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.

In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.

It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire peoples imagination, and all of them were very difficult women.

My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.

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?... I dont know the answer, I know only that I cant.