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Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes about Pain

All Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes Depression Feelings Fighting Giving Heart Hurt Jesus Life Literature Love Mental Health Morning Pain quotes Past Perspective Sadness Sleep Sorrow Writing
That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Depression, Pain, Being Sad
Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.55, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Love, Girl, Pain
Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.214, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal-unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Pain, Sadness, Space
Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Pain or not, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it? Couldn't talk and thoughts of suicide be considered a whole malady of their own, a special subcategory of depression in which the loss of a will to live has not quite been displaced by a determination to die?

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Suicide, Determination, Pain
Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.138, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. Its so bad, its useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Jesus, Art, Pain
Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.231, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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
Death, Stars, Pain
Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.85, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The most likely person to kill you is your wife, but that probably won't happen. What probably will happen is a million little betrayals of varying degrees of pain, brought on by people you love, the only ones who really can hurt you.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Hurt, Pain, Betrayal
Elizabeth Wurtzel (2012). “Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women”, p.53, Anchor

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