The collection / 57 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1993 AD

When she walks in that first Monday, of course I am awake - I am always up these days - I decide to lay it down. “Look”, I say, “I snort Ritalin. That’s what I do. I snort it all day long. I crush up the pills and inhale them like cocaine. I’m up to about forty a day. I can’t stop. I am planning to get help, to check into rehab or something like that, as soon as this book is finished. In the meantime, I can’t stop, and I am not going to.” She looks at me impassively. “I don’t care what you think about it. So you have a choice. I can sit here and do it in front of you, or I can keep running into the bathroom so you don’t have to see. Either way, it’s going to happen, so it’s just about how bad it’s going to make you feel to watch.”She doesn’t seem to know what to say. She stares. I think she is going to cry. I think she wants to give me a hug, maybe, but there is an invisible cage, a delicate netting of glass, an ice sculpture surrounding me that no one can walk through. I’m cold. I’ve frozen into someone who just can’t be touched. I dare you to try.

Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote

02c. 1993 AD

Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.

Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote

03c. 1993 AD

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

Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote

04c. 1993 AD

It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women.

Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote

05c. 1993 AD

My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.

Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote

06c. 1993 AD

Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?... I don't know the answer, I know only that I can't.

Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote

07c. 1993 AD

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 / quote

08c. 1993 AD

I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess.

Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote

09c. 1993 AD

People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.

Elizabeth Wurtzel / quote