Prozac Nation Quotes

“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, Prozac Nation

“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…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony...Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America

“Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression. ”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I can’t quite shake this feeling that we live in a world gone wrong, that there are all these feelings you’re not supposed to have because there’s no reason to anymore. But still they’re there, stuck somewhere, a flaw that evolution hasn’t managed to eliminate yet. I want so badly to feel bad about getting pregnant. But I can’t, don’t dare to. Just like I didn’t dare tell Jack that I was falling in love with him, wanting to be a modern woman who’s supposed to be able to handle the casual nature of these kinds of relationships. I’m never supposed to say, to Jack or anyone else, ‘What makes you think I’m so rich that you can steal my heart and it won’t mean a thing?’ Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression, because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was all right for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left. Deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships is nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. Now it’s just the way things go, part of the growth process. Really nothing is surprising. After a while, meaning and implication detach themselves from everything. If one can be a father and assume no obligations, it follows that one can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all. Pretty soon you can add friend, acquaintance, co-worker, and just about anyone else to the long list of people who seem to be part of your life, though there is no code of conduct that they must adhere to. Pretty soon, it seems unreasonable to be bothered or outraged by much of anything because, well, what did you expect?”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say, But maybe not for seventy or eighty years. And I say, Maybe you, but me, I'm already gone.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“...if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel

“Exactly, what form this alteration has taken. I will never know. I don't feel sedated, jittery or drugged. I simply feel normal-as if I had been driving a car all these years with the parking brake on, and now it is off. I feel as if the real me has returned, perhaps all the way from childhood, where she lived before The Beast arrived.”
― William Dudley, Antidepressants

“Sometimes I sense that I have lost an intensity of feeling along with the moments of lacerating despair, I have greedily swapped them for ordinary life. That may sound dull, but I tell you it is sweet. It is not caviar I crave, but clean sheets and hot soup.”
― William Dudley, Antidepressants

“But in the end, none of the good was any match for the aching, enduring, suicidal pain.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“There was no way the head counselor or anyone else would ever understand that I didn't like being this way. How jealous I was of all the other girls who were boy crazy and loud and fun. How much I wanted to flip my hair and flirt and be rowdy but somehow just couldn't -didn't dare- even try anymore.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“And I can't help feeling that anything that works so effectively, that's so transformative, has got to be hurting me at another end, maybe sometime further down the road.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I can't equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“My inner resources were so thorough and complete that I often had no idea what to do with other children.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I was surprised at how straight the line was and at how easy it was for me to hurt myself this way.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I want so badly to have my life circumstances match the oppressiveness I feel internally.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I find myself praying, wishing, hoping that God could just give me whatever it is that makes girls attractive to boys my age.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I am so caught up in the idea that nobody would actually try to save me if I were to slit my wrists or hang myself from one of the rafters in the bunk. I can't believe anyone might care enough to try to keep me alive.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I mean, I was kind of weird as thirteen-year-olds go, but it's not like I needed to be relocated to another planet in order to fit in. Or maybe I did. I was starting to feel that way.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I was, after the breakup, what you call a complete wreck. For the first time in my life, my pain had a focus.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“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, Prozac Nation

“I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief, I need this horrible big muddy to go away right now.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“It seems like no amount of reassurance from him can convince me that he's really mine.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I get paralyzed sometimes. One day, we are in the shower and I want to say to him, I could be submerged in sixty feet of water right now, never drowning, never even fearing drowning, knowing I would always be safe with you here, knowing that it would be okay to die as long as you are here. I want to say this but I don't.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Nothing is real to me unless it's right in front of me.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I want my corpse to be white like these sheets, whiter than these blankets. I want to be drained of my blood and my humanity forever. I never want to feel again.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

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

“I tell myself I'm not scared, I tell myself I really want to die, and it never occurs to me until the last possible moment that what I really want is to be saved.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“At age twenty-six, I feel like I am finally going through adolescence.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation