Quotes By Letter: W
“I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“I would actually sit on the bus to Dr. Sterlings office trying to think of things to talk about. I felt like a girl heading out for a first date with her dream boy, creating a mental agenda of potential conversation ideas just in case, heaven forbid, there was any kind of lag. I worried I wasn't entertaining Dr. Sterling enough, I worried that she's put me on some list of her dull patients that she'd share with her husband late at night, of the ones who couldn't even scare up enough psychodrama in their lives to get themselves through a fifty-minute hour. I worried that my decision to abstain from self-destruction was turning me into a bore. I began to think that in my current state I was too sane for therapy.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“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. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“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.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“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. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in it's wake.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“Inside here it is sterile, it is drab, the light is artificial and too bright, but at least no one can touch me.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“Sometimes as I lie on the floor in the dark by the phone waiting for his call, I try to figure out what in the hell has gotten into me. Why am I so afraid of not hearing from him? It wouldn't be so bad. I could get some sleep for a change. I could get started on reading one of the tomes I'd schlepped down from Cambridge in preparation for my junior tutorial. I could try The Second Sex, I could plow through A Vindication of the Rights of Women, I could figure out how the hell to free myself from this enslavement to men. Of course, Simone de Beauvoir was basically a fool for Sartre, and I seem to recall learning that Mary Wollstonecraft was over her head for ? who was it? ? John Stuart Mill, I think. But Jack is no Jean-Paul. In fact if it weren't such a devastating thought, I could probably admit that Jack is no nothing. Pick a man, any man. Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first twenty-four hours of our relationship. I know that this happens, I see it happening, I even feel myself, sometimes, standing at some temporary crossroads, some distinct moment at which I can walk away ? just say no ? and keep it from happening, but I never do. I grab at everything, I end up with nothing, and then I feel bereft. I mourn for the loss of something I never even had. I am a sick, sick girl."”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead. 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. 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.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
Recommended by Lindsey.
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“Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“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. The fog is like a cage without a key.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“This hatred overtook me, and I couldn't help myself. 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.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“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 there is no way to objectify it 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.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.”
-Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
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