Top 160 Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it’s the worst.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

3. “That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

4. “Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

5. “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

6. “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

7. “I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

8. “A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight!”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

9. “If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

10. “I need someone to shut off my brain, and turn on my heart.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

11. “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

12. “They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

13. “In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

14. “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

15. “Sometimes it feels like we’re all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Very early in my life it was already too late.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

19. “Because trying to see all sides, such an instinct is particularly Jewish.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

20. “I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

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

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

22. “The voices in my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

23. “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

24. “Israel fights back, which is very much at odds with the Jewish instinct to discuss and deconstruct everything until action itself seems senseless.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

25. “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

26. “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

27. “It’s like Samson and Delilah: watch your back, because trouble could be the person you’re sleeping with.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

28. “Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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. It’s so bad, it’s useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

34. “Story of my life: I am so self-destructive, I turn solutions into problems. Everything I touch, I ruin. I’m Midas in reverse.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

35. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

36. “I mean, if you were to find a shattered mirror, find all the pieces, all the shards and all the tiny chips, and have whatever skill and patience it took to put all that broken glass back together so that it was complete once again, the restored mirror would still be spiderwebbed with cracks, it would still be a useless glued version of its former self, which could show only fragmented reflections of anyone looking into it. Some things are beyond repair. And that was me.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

37. “Oh, Ma, you’re looking at all the trees, and I’m not even in the forest.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Everything’s plastic, we’re all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

41. “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

42. “I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

43. “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

44. “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

45. “People talk about the way disembodied spirits roam the world with no place to park themselves, but all I can think is that I am a dispirited body, and I’m sure there are plenty of other human mollusk shells roaming around, waiting for some soul to fill them up.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

46. “Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

47. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

48. “How can you hide from what never goes away? – Heraclitus.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

49. “And I want out of this life on drugs.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

50. “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