110+ Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes On Education, Death And Elizabeth Wutzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel is an American writer and journalist best known for her 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation. She has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Wurtzel is a graduate of Harvard Law School and has written extensively about mental health and feminism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Elizabeth Wurtzel on education, love, death.

Top 10 Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

1. That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
2. 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.
3. I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.
4. Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.
5. I admire Bruce Springsteen because he's a heroic person who has lots of integrity and has this incredible body of work that is so vital.
6. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.
7. ...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.
8. 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.
9. Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.
10. The voices in my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence.

Elizabeth Wurtzel Short Quotes

• In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.
• Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.
• Ritalin abuse is a big issue in the US.
• They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.
• My life's actually been quite dull; it's not all that glamorous.
• Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.
• If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking
• I dont know if im running because i'm scared or if i'm scared because i'm running.
• ...All I want to talk about is the oncoming apocalypse in my brain.
• Because trying to see all sides, such an instinct is particularly Jewish.

Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes About Love

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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

Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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

Its the people you are close to, the ones who love you, the ones who have seen your heart, who have touched your soul - to them, it is obvious that something is wrong or missing. Your heart and soul are missing. They feel it. It hurts them. It kills them. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I am crying over the elusive nature of love. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

A deeply true, wholly aching account of the dangerous way we live now--LOVE JUNKIE is great fun to read, and finally fully redemptive. Rachel Resnick brings a light, delightful touch to a hard subject, and creates a great, relatable, readable memoir. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The most likely person to kill you is your wife, but that probably won't happen. What probably will happen is a million little betrayals of varying degrees of pain, brought on by people you love, the only ones who really can hurt you. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes About Depression

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

I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight! — Elizabeth Wurtzel

In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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

Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

My God, I could raise a family of six children and hold down a full-time job with all the energy I expend on depression! — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel Famous Quotes And Sayings

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess. — 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

It's like Samson and Delilah: watch your back, because trouble could be the person you're sleeping with. — 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

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — 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 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 — Elizabeth Wurtzel

That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good? — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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’s all I can say too. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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 don't know the answer, I know only that I can't. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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? — Elizabeth Wurtzel

You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labour somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic--I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you've got all this great wisdom, you don't get to be young anymore. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel. — 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

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning. — 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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes, that is that, and I am heartbroken to live through a time where Wall Street money means these women are not treated with due disdain. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time. — 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

I guess I realize that I don't want to die. I don't want to live either, but-there really isn't anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it's easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it's going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

All I do is go to the movies. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

...if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. — 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

I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. 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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

If you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistantly, they then have nothing left except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming around in the gut, but so far down, so hidden, it's impossible to find. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Sometimes I wish that there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Pick a man, any man. Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first twenty four hours. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — 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

Belief is a good thing in principle, but an annoying thing in human beings. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The measure of 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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

As soon as I was out in the street, I realized I didn't want to be alone after all, I realized I didn't want to be anything at all. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

And I want out of this life on drugs. — 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

I sit there in my bed staring at the wall, feeling happy, enjoying the way the wall looks, how pink and how white it is. Pink and white, as far as I’m concerned, have never looked quite so pink and white before. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

As it is my good fortune to be American, I live in the only country that as a matter of policy is pro-Israel regardless of party allegiance; Democrats and Republicans equally unite behind the blue-and-white. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I am so tired of the girl in the infirmary, I am so sick of the girl who cries wolf all the time - even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm. Not one of my pleas was ever less than truly urgent because when it's all in your mind, there always IS a wolf. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Pick a man, any man. Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first twenty-four hours of our relationship. I know that this happens, I see it happening, I even feel myself, sometimes, standing at some temporal crossroads, some distinct moment at which I can walk away and keep it from happening, but I never do. I grab at everything, I end up with nothing, and then I feel bereft. I mourn for the loss of something I never even had. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I know I can do so much more than this, I know that I could be a life force, could love with a heart full of soul, could feel with the power that flies men to the moon. I know that if I could just get out from under this depression, there is so much I could do besides cry in front of the TV on a Saturday night. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I am sick of the girl who cries 'wolf' all the time. Even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Whenever I talk to anyone I care about, I am always seeking approval. There is always a pleading lilt in my voice that demands love. Even the people I work with, the ones I am supposed to have a professional relationship with, all business, get pulled into my need. I can't help it. I want to be adored. — 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

And what I thought, every time I thought about my father, every time his name came up, was quite simply: I WANT TO KILL YOU. I wanted to be more mature, more reasonable, I wanted to have a big, fat, forgiving heart that could contain all this rage and still find room for kind, beneficent love, but I didn't have it in me. I just didn't. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Doing nothing is opting for the sweetness of stillness...Instead of fighting with that which you cannot control, you might as well just see it through. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find. — 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

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

Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

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

Even if I remember the first time perfectly, I don't remember the beginning at all. I mean: the beginning of addiction. It's hard to say when it becomes a problem; it sneaks up on you like a sun shower. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

How can you hide from what never goes away? --Heraclitus — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Life Lessons by Elizabeth Wurtzel

1. Elizabeth Wurtzel's work emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and self-care in order to lead a meaningful life.
2. Her writings shed light on the importance of recognizing and accepting one's own emotions and experiences, as well as the struggles of others.
3. Her work encourages readers to be honest with themselves and to be open to learning from the experiences of others.