Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel is an American writer and journalist, known for publishing her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation, at the age of 26. She holds a BA in comparative literature from Harvard College and a JD from Yale Law School...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 July 1967
CountryUnited States of America
summer crazy merit
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.
memories crazy past
It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now.
suicide self-harm broken
...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.
heart brain needs
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.
too-late late
Very early in my life it was already too late.
art jesus pain
Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. Its so bad, its useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.
want streets wants-to-be-alone
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.
depression pills mental-health
Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent
depression real thinking
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.
strong jobs sadness
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.
eye body unbearable
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.
kissing devastation firsts
So many more cycles of elation of the first kiss, and devastation when it's over.
morning sleep divorce
Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning.
passion approval-of-others insane
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