Top 160 Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I am sick of the girl who cries ‘wolf’ all the time. Even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

53. “My life’s actually been quite dull; it’s not all that glamorous.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

54. “I don’t want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

55. “The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I’m already gone.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

56. “I am so tired of the girl in the infirmary, I am so sick of the girl who cries wolf all the time – even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm. Not one of my pleas was ever less than truly urgent because when it’s all in your mind, there always IS a wolf.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

57. “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

58. “I don’t mean to sound like a spoiled brat. I know that into every sunny life a little rain must fall and all that, but in my case, the crisis-level hysteria is an all-too-recurring theme. The voices inside my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence And I’ve been on these goddamn pills for years.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

59. “But just as a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little bit of energy, in the hands of someone hell-bent on suicide, is a very dangerous thing.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

60. “Its the people you are close to, the ones who love you, the ones who have seen your heart, who have touched your soul – to them, it is obvious that something is wrong or missing. Your heart and soul are missing. They feel it. It hurts them. It kills them.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

61. “Pick a man, any man. Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first twenty four hours...”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

62. “Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop it.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

63. “In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

64. “I am crying over the elusive nature of love.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

65. “Even if I remember the first time perfectly, I don’t remember the beginning at all. I mean: the beginning of addiction. It’s hard to say when it becomes a problem; it sneaks up on you like a sun shower.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

66. “I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me. About anything. Don’t apologize unless you have done something wrong. It is nasty to feel sorry for anyone for any reason because it pushes her away.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

67. “I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

68. “After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

69. “In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

70. “It didn’t and doesn’t turn out well. There is no happy ending to the story of sorrow if you are born with a predilection for despair. The world is, after all, a coarse and brutal and cruel place. It’s only a matter of how long you can live with it.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

71. “Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of ‘keeping away from the dope.’ But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

72. “Some friends don’t understand this. They don’t understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you’re wonderful just the way you are. They don’t understand that I can’t remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

73. “Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it’s all perfectly normal in the morning.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

74. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

75. “I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes, that is that, and I am heartbroken to live through a time where Wall Street money means these women are not treated with due disdain.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

76. “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

77. “I know I want out of this mess. I want out. No one will ever love me, I will live and die alone, I will go nowhere fast, I will be nothing at all. Nothing will work out. The promise that on the other side of depression lies a beautiful life, one worth surviving suicide for, will have turned out wrong. It will all be a big dupe.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

78. “I don’t think it’s really about being bitchy or demanding or cold or calculating: those characteristics, after all, can be attached to most women with even the paltriest of evidence. 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...”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

79. “Banned! My eyes light up, I think I see stars. Anything that has been banned by anyone must be something I’d like.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

80. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

81. “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

82. “Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

83. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

84. “It’s being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It’s the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

85. “Our suffering is small compared to our misunderstandings with others, how they fail to give us a break, know what it’s like, judge us fairly, see the world the way we do.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

86. “Like, in high school, I was a good student and got straight As. It was very strict and you couldn’t do well there unless you studied very hard, but every time there was any trouble, I was the first person they would be talking to.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

87. “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

88. “I come from a family of screamers. If they are trying to express any emotion or idea beyond pass the salt, it comes in shrieks.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

89. “Sometimes I wish that there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt so bad the morning after.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

90. “Judaism will be enmeshed in pride and shame for as long as it endures. But to endure as a country, Israel must shun both these tendencies.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

91. “Lying in bed for a few days wouldn’t help enact the kind of personality overhaul it would take to pull me away from my well-established pattern of mapping out escape routes, clinging to them like vines, and then watching as these lifeless forces suddenly pushed me away, though I continued to hold on for dear life.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

92. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

93. “You don’t even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

94. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

95. “The whole offensive culture of dieting seems invented as yet another way to make women smaller and weaker – to make us become less, quite literally. The starving self symbolizes a diminishing person, and really we ought to strive to be more, to have more strength and muscle and inner resolve – which is what we get from working out or playing a sport, and what we lose when we live in hunger.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

96. “All I do is go to the movies.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

97. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

98. “In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

99. “Years of depression have robbed me of that – well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

100. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel