“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
“Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
“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.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
“There are all these things my mother is good for that my father isn’t, and all these things my father is good for that my mother isn’t, and if only they could work out their differences, or keep the dim of discord to a minimum, I could have two whole parents.”
— 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
“I don’t think it matters how many parents you’ve got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence in a long way.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
“Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.”
— 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
“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 I’ve 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.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
“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.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
“I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
“How can you hide from what never goes away?”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
“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.”
— 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
“They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.”
— 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
“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
“Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.”
— 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
“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
“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
“I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word ‘madness’ to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. ‘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.”
— 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
“In those pamphlets that they give at mental health centers where they list the ten or so symptoms that would indicate a clinical depression, ‘suicide threats’ or even simple ‘talk of suicide’ is considered cause for concern. I guess the point is that what’s just talk one day may become a real activity the next. So perhaps after years of walking around with these germinal feelings, these raw thoughts, these scattered moments of saying I wish I were dead, eventually I too, sooner or later, would succumb to the death urge. In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead.”
— Elizabeth Wurtzel