Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut.

Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning.

I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave.

Banned! My eyes light up, I think I see stars. Anything that has been banned by anyone must be something I’d like.

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.

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

Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.

Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees, and I'm not even in the forest.

Judaism will be enmeshed in pride and shame for as long as it endures. But to endure as a country, Israel must shun both these tendencies.

Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.

But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.

Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die.

Doing nothing is opting for the sweetness of stillness...Instead of fighting with that which you cannot control, you might as well just see it through.

I come from a family of screamers. If they are trying to express any emotion or idea beyond pass the salt, it comes in shrieks.

They can give you all the pills on earth and do whatever - and you're still yourself.

Because trying to see all sides, such an instinct is particularly Jewish.

As soon as I was out in the street, I realized I didn't want to be alone after all, I realized I didn't want to be anything at all.

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.

I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.

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.

Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.

I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.

Belief is a good thing in principle, but an annoying thing in human beings.

Pick a man, any man. Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first twenty four hours.

Am I worried people will say I'm repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.

So many more cycles of elation of the first kiss, and devastation when it's over.

Very early in my life it was already too late.

I am sick of the girl who cries 'wolf' all the time. Even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm

And I want out of this life on drugs.

if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.

For all of my life I have needed more.

I am crying over the elusive nature of love.

All I do is go to the movies.

You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.

Sometimes I wish that there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after.

Israel fights back, which is very much at odds with the Jewish instinct to discuss and deconstruct everything until action itself seems senseless.

I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes, that is that, and I am heartbroken to live through a time where Wall Street money means these women are not treated with due disdain.

...All I want to talk about is the oncoming apocalypse in my brain.

I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence in a long way.

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