from Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

I guess I wasn’t hopeless enough. I searched around for a movie and found Prozac Nation, which is apparently not considered a great movie. Nonetheless, it’s on TV now. I searched around for something the main character said, and found that Wurtzel doesn’t like the movie. I ended up doing a quotation hunt, to read more of the book since I can’t trust the movie. I don’t know if any of this is in the movie, or if like the first one the idea is in the movie but the words are different. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t know what order they should be in. I just needed to write them down.

“…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.”

“That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.”

“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?”

“No one will ever love me, I will live and die alone, I will go nowhere fast, I will be nothing at all. Nothing will work out. 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.”

Tags: depression |
movies