Prozac Nation Quotes
"I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn’t one I’ll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it’s worth it."
"I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out."
"What I do feel is the scariness of being an adult, being alone in this big huge loft with so many CDs and plastic bags and magazines and pairs of dirty socks and dirty plates on the floor that I can’t even see the floor."
"No one will ever love me, I will live and die alone, I will go nowhere fast, I will be nothing at all."
"I am petrified in my dream and I am petrified in reality because it is as if my dream is reality and I am having a nervous breakdown and I have nowhere to turn."
"The promise that on the other side of depression lies a beautiful life, one worth surviving suicide for, will have turned out wrong. It will all be a big dupe."
"How long is a person who is on psychotropic drugs supposed to live? How long before your brain, not to mention the rest of you, will begin to mush and deteriorate?"
"My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake."
"Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable."
"One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live."
"My depression did not occur in a vacuum, nor did it eradicate my urge and desire to get better if there was an earthly way to do so."
"I must have understood that my material circumstances were such that I alone could keep myself from falling."
"What if you are the only resting point you know of? What if you are absolute zero? What if only you can catch yourself?"
"I want to renounce everything that came before Zachary and deny that there would ever be an after."
"Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I’m always missing someone or someplace or something, I’m always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere."
"I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who looks so very vibrant and shimmery, but who is in fact soon going to be gone."
"If you take someone’s thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistently, then they have nothing left, except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming round the gut."
"Imagine, if you will, a worldwide conspiracy to deny the existence of the colour yellow."
"Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop it."
"It is not atypical of your generation to look for the chemical cure for everything."
"I was the only person going to a prostitute in search of true love."
"I can’t go on like this much longer. Why won’t any of the doctors help me?"
"Drinking in Dallas was a lot more fun than it had ever been anywhere else, although I couldn’t say why."
"You see, it was no longer just me. Harvard was full of nut cases, and we’d all managed to find each other."
"I wanted so badly to lose myself in sex, to be thoroughly slutty and have one zipless fuck after another. I wanted to be a wild thing."
"I spent most of my life trying to please my mother, and instead I just disappointed her."
"The idea of movement, the idea that I could walk wherever I wanted to, that I was free within my own body, was liberating."
"The idea of going anywhere with only a thin knowledge of the native tongue seemed like a task that would require more energy than I would have to expend for the rest of my life."
"I see that you're not a completely irrational being. Something he does must be tipping you off."
"I just don’t feel like I have a right to be so miserable."
"The key to happiness, I decided, was not to appear on Oprah!"
"Life is awful, Ruby treats me horribly, I just want to die."
"I am crying about the elusive nature of love, the impossibility of ever having someone so completely that he can fill up the hole, the gaping hole that for me right now is full of depression."
"There's not a lot to do at Stillman besides read and watch TV."
"The fog is like a cage without a key."
"You don’t have to try to kill yourself first. I take you seriously now."
"Nothing is real to me unless it’s right in front of me."
"I am like the title character in the film Betty Blue, the woman who is so full of... so full of something or other."
"I am depressed to the point of being incapable of much else besides lying in this white room."
"It seems not so long ago, maybe only a decade ago, I was a little girl trying out a new persona."
"I suppose because the alternative is too frightening."
"I’ve got to go home. Even if such a place doesn’t really exist."
"Why do I believe this is possible? Because the alternative is too frightening."
"I can’t stand this feeling of thinking that you maybe know more than I do."
"I wanted to make a whole tape that would play all his different recordings of 'You’re a Big Girl Now' continuously."
"I like the feeling of not running, the reprieve from life that I’d come to London to find."
"When I want to escape, it is amazing what I am able to do."
"Treatment for depression costs the United States something like $43 billion annually in lost productivity and employee absence."
"The thought of how bad it will feel to be alone with my feelings... makes London seem like a beautiful reward."
"Depression is a huge waste of time and money."
"It astonishes me to recall what clarity of vision I needed in order to plan this trip to London in the first place."
"I feel like an alcoholic or drug addict who will do anything to avoid going to AA or into rehab."
"I am able to enjoy simple pleasures like food and sex, and tend to oversleep and overeat."
"Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds."
"I am so wrecked already, so unstable, a piece of work who was never given the tools it takes to deal with what everyone else considers business as usual."
"Isabella couldn’t stop cleaning herself just as certain people can’t stop vacuuming their apartments, or washing their hands all the time like Lady Macbeth."
"Maybe that’s what my cat needs. I mean, he’s been under the weather lately."
"I never thought that depression could seem funny."
"It seemed that suddenly, some time in 1990, I ceased to be this freakishly depressed person and I instead became downright trendy."
"How is it possible that so many are so miserable?"
"It seems to me that there’s something wrong with a world where all these pills are circulating, floating around the atmosphere like a spreading virus."
"Prozac really isn’t that great. Of course, I can say this and still believe that Prozac was the miracle that saved my life."
"Every person who has experienced a severe depression has his own sad, awful tale to tell, his own mess to live through."
"Thanks to Beat Rodeo, Brendan, and everyone at the Ludlow Street Café for making Monday nights the best way to start the week."