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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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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
Book
Remembering
Whole
Figured
Writing
Grown
Never
Handle
Hair
Scrubbing
Write
Tubs
Cannot
Shampoo
Remember
Basics

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In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.
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Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.
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You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.
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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.
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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.
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Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest.
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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.
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I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess.
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Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die.
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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.
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That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
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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?
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Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.
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...if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.
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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.
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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.
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How can you hide from what never goes away? --Heraclitus
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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.
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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.
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Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning.
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