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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
Attic
Prozac
Attics
Inside
Wasn
Past

More quotes by Elizabeth Wurtzel

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A deeply true, wholly aching account of the dangerous way we live now--LOVE JUNKIE is great fun to read, and finally fully redemptive. Rachel Resnick brings a light, delightful touch to a hard subject, and creates a great, relatable, readable memoir.
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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No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.
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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Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me.
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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I start to feel like I can't maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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
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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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Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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
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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 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
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All I do is go to the movies.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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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
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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
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Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression.
Elizabeth Wurtzel