Top 160 Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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

102. “I was scared of the way I felt as I ran away, knowing that if I stopped, I might have to confront the reason I was always running – and I’d have to admit that there was no reason. Run, run, run. Was it toward something or away from something else?”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

103. “Ritalin abuse is a big issue in the US.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

104. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

105. “Depression is a very narcissistic thing, it’s a self involvement that is so deep and intense that it means the sufferer cannot get out of her own head long enough to see what real good, what genuine loveliness, there is in the world around her.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

106. “You know you’ve completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

107. “Neurology takes a positive view toward god and prayer. And relinquishing, which is what god and prayer is about. It is always turning your will over to a higher power and letting the will of the world and not your extraordinary manipulations lead you to your desired result. I always say that, it is my constant prayer: god, if you are out there, watch over me and your will, not mine, be done. That is what will happen anyway, but I pray for release from the dreadful fight.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

108. “They can give you all the pills on earth and do whatever – and you’re still yourself.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

109. “But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

110. “I don’t much like my life, but for some dumb reason, I want to be alive, because sooner or later, I figure it will work out.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

111. “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

112. “I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

113. “I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

114. “If only life could be more like the movies, where characters muddle through things and do what’s right in the end. But real life isn’t like that.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

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

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

116. “It is hard to get back what is lost. It is more difficult still to begin anew.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

117. “Cancer is an ecosystem. It is a crime spree.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

118. “The words madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

119. “Depression is a lot like that: slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearale. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getter older, about turning eight or about turning twelve or turning fifteeen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

120. “And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can’t equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

121. “I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word ‘madness’ to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. ‘Madness’ is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

122. “In order for therapy to be effective, a patient must be prodded and provoked, forced into confrontations, given sufficient incentive to push herself out of the caged fog of depression.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

123. “I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

124. “That’s what it’s like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts – blizzards, cyclones.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

125. “My mom feared the outside world and my dad feared me and my mom; we lived in a paranoid household in which everyone defined his own enemies and pretty soon everyone was implicated.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

126. “So many more cycles of elation of the first kiss, and devastation when it’s over.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

127. “I was the only person going to a prostitute in search of true love. But somehow, no matter how often I was disappointed, I was always game for the next round, like a drug addict hoping that a new fix will give him a rush as good as the first one. Only I’d never even had the initial euphoria that makes a junkie keep coming back for more. I always sought solace in places where I knew, I didn’t belong.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

128. “I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don’t know, read something or write my masterpiece.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

129. “Whether the emotion is true or truly wished for, anytime anything resembling love comes my way, it makes a fool of me. It.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

130. “He seemed a fool-everyone who didn’t feel like me seems a fool.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

131. “There are some remarks that are so stupid that to be even vaguely aware of them is the intellectual equivalent of living next door to Chernobyl.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

132. “One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

133. “I was completely wrapped up in a person who didn’t know me at all, like a claustrophobe who chose to live in a small dark cave, trying to whip the fear.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

134. “And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren’t we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

135. “I admire Bruce Springsteen because he’s a heroic person who has lots of integrity and has this incredible body of work that is so vital.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

136. “Money, or the lack of it, pervaded the house as only something that is absent can.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

137. “Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done?”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

138. “People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn’t have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

139. “I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

140. “I’d really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

141. “Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

142. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

143. “But in the end, after the curtain dropped over these little dramas, they all seemed able to go back to their rooms and back to their lives, they all seemed to know that it was just a game, that it scuffed you up and wore you out a little, but that you would get on with it. Only I seemed to be left behind, crying and screaming about wanting more, wanting my money back, wanting some satisfaction, wanting to feel something. I was the only person going to a prostitute in search of true love.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

144. “I’ll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I’ll feel that she’s a politician, like she’s got an agenda to get across and that she doesn’t always say what’s really true or exactly what she feels.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

145. “I had tried so hard for so many years to turn all my despair into sexual abandon, I wanted so much to stop being me and start being someone else’s toy, but I didn’t have it in me.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

146. “The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labour somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

147. “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.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

148. “Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we’re now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

149. “As it is my good fortune to be American, I live in the only country that as a matter of policy is pro-Israel regardless of party allegiance; Democrats and Republicans equally unite behind the blue-and-white.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

150. “Most people, using everything they have in real life, cannot take hold of you the way a talented writer can without even being there. Talent is the ability to mesmerize people when you are nowhere near. Talent is the ability to make something that is more stunning than human presence.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel