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

Elizabeth Wurtzel

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Elizabeth Wurtzel
Age: 52 †
Born: 1967
Born: July 31
Died: 2020
Died: January 7
Autobiographer
Journalist
Lawyer
Writer
New York City
New York
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel
Purposeful
Depression
Seem
Pain
Seems
Life
Purposelessness
Purposefulness
Prozac

More quotes by Elizabeth Wurtzel

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Whenever I talk to anyone I care about, I am always seeking approval. There is always a pleading lilt in my voice that demands love. Even the people I work with, the ones I am supposed to have a professional relationship with, all business, get pulled into my need. I can't help it. I want to be adored.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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So many more cycles of elation of the first kiss, and devastation when it's over.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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How can you hide from what never goes away? --Heraclitus
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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
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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. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power, ... We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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
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I know I can do so much more than this, I know that I could be a life force, could love with a heart full of soul, could feel with the power that flies men to the moon. I know that if I could just get out from under this depression, there is so much I could do besides cry in front of the TV on a Saturday night.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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
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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
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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
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If you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistantly, they then have nothing left except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming around in the gut, but so far down, so hidden, it's impossible to find.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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
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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
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It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.
Elizabeth Wurtzel