After all, as it says on a needlepoint sampler or throw pillow or the occasional bumper sticker: Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere. In high heels. Or mules by Anglo Blank, the scrappy, tangle kind that give you blisters. And when their feet start to hurt, they bitch about it a lot, until someone agrees to carry them home. Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done? We women still only make seventy-one cents, on average, for every man's dollar. We still have to listen to studies telling us that a single woman over the age of 35 had best avoid airplanes because she is more likely to die in a terrorist attack than get married.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you've got all this great wisdom, you don't get to be young anymore.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane:… Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable… Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all life is the one bad moment… Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It’s a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not—and not some other way.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And I want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

As someone very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menéndez Brothers: anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siècle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

At heart, I have always been a cover, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

Because, frankly, I have a tough time feeling that feminism has done a damn bit of good if I can't be the way I am and have the world accommodate it on some level.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

Embrace fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others

— Elizabeth Wurtzel