298 Quotes by 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.

Love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion – assuming it was even real – hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grow up in an era of divorce are – in response to some atavistic instinct – still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small.

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.

But now, years later, I must admit that unhappiness seems to run in the family, there have been so many generations of it on my dad’s side that I wonder why someone doesn’t just put a stop to it. I don’t know why someone doesn’t throw a big black umbrella over our heads and pull us all out of the rain.

I am a monotheist. I am in it for life. I am in everything for life. If you don’t stop me, I will not stop myself. I have the kind of faith that you can only have if you have talked your way out of trouble all along.

I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated, the ones who are so intriguing that new men fall in love with them every day, at every meal where there’s a waiter, in every taxi and on every train they board, in any instance where someone can get to know them just a little bit, just enough to get completely gone. But most men in the end don’t quite have the stomach for that much person.

I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic – I was the attic itself.

Am I worried people will say I’m repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.

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