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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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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
Prozac
Attics
Inside
Wasn
Past
Attic

More quotes by Elizabeth Wurtzel

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It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.
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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That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
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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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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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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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
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homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.
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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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
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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.
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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Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.
Elizabeth Wurtzel