298 Quotes by 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.

The desire to be seen as superior and singular- and, conversely, but similarly, inferior and individual, is a big topic... They have a term for the syndrome- it is called terminal uniqueness... we all refuse to be part of the crowd, to walk in the middle of the road in the safety of others. We all think were special. But the problem is, as I point out to Dr. Singer all the time, I actually am special.

I’ve got to go home. Even if such place doesn’t really exist.

And it seemed hard to believe that these people who were so close to me couldn’t see how desperate I was, or if they could they didn’t care enough to do anything about it, or if they cared enough to do anything about it they didn’t believe there was anything they could do, not knowing – or not wanting to know – that their belief might have been the thing that made the difference.

Yes, there was a certain beautiful honesty to my depressed state – I miss it sometimes now. I miss having so little stake in maintaining the status quo that I could walk out of rooms in tears at times that other people would have deemed inappropriate. I liked that about myself. I liked that disregard for convention.

Affection as medicine is highly overrated... a person who is as sick with depression as I most certainly was cannot possibly be rescued through the power of anyone’s love.

But he does insist on a conversation. Goddamn it! Why can’t people just do what I want them to do and be gone? It’s a worldwide conspiracy to make me be polite when I don’t want to be.

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.

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.