If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

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. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. Furthermore, 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

I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

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.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

In those pamphlets that they give at mental health centers where they list the ten or so symptoms that would indicate a clinical depression, 'suicide threats' or even simple 'talk of suicide' is considered cause for concern. I guess the point is that what's just talk one day may become a real activity the next. So perhaps after years of walking around with these germinal feelings, these raw thoughts, these scattered moments of saying I wish I were dead, eventually I too, sooner or later, would succumb to the death urge. In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel