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[opening narration]
Elizabeth: Back, back, back. How fucking far back do you go? My mom and dad were divorced before I was two, and from then on, my father was almost uninvolved in my life and my mother much too involved. She wanted to make up for all her mistakes through me.
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Elizabeth: One night there was something in my pants, like blood. My mom said "Oh, Hell, your period. This is where all the trouble starts." She was right.
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Elizabeth: Now Mom and Dad really had something to fight over: me. Then one day my dad disappeared. No number, no letters, just gone. I wrote to Seventeen magazine, a long letter about us. They wanted to publish it as an article but kept asking "Your dad going away, does he come back? Does it have a happy ending?" In reality it didn't, but I thought, what the hell, I'll give them what they want.
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Mrs. Wurtzel: [Elizabeth is about to go off to college] This is the most important day of your life.
Elizabeth: I thought that's when you get married.
Mrs. Wurtzel: No, honey, that's the worst day of your life.
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Mrs. Wurtzel: [on the phone] Mom, she looks beautiful.
Elizabeth: Pity, I was aiming for psychotic.
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Elizabeth: Ever since I was a little kid, my mom and I always hung out together. I didn't fit in with most kids in school. They thought I was strange, so they made me feel like a stranger. And my mother took advantage of it from an early age, throwing me into plays, spelling bees, studying, writing, museums, concerts, and even more writing. She convinced me this would lead to the Holy Grail: Harvard. A place where I would finally be surrounded by people I had something in common with.
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Elizabeth: [to Ruby] We'll be like these beautiful literary freaks. Being brilliant and dark, sexy.
[they giggle]
Elizabeth: [narrating] Trouble is, I'm deadly serious.
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Elizabeth: I'd been saving my virginity for someone who truly loves me, who really knows the inside of me. Noah wasn't it. He told me afterwards that in terms of absolute value, sex and drugs were equally meaningless to him. Just two different ways to have fun. Which is all well and good, until a girl tries out the same approach.
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Elizabeth: You know, if you're going to suggest therapy, don't. I'm living proof it doesn't work.
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[Ruby has found out that her boyfriend got a blowjob from Elizabeth]
Elizabeth: You don't understand. OK? You don't understand, it was an accident.
Ruby: An accident? You call that a fucking accident?
Elizabeth: It was... it was sort of, you know...
Ruby: Come on, what?
Elizabeth: An accidental blowjob?
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Elizabeth: Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.
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[Elizabeth is drunk and behaving badly during dinner with her mother and grandparents]
Grandmother: Is she on drugs?
Elizabeth: Oh, I wish I was on drugs.
Mrs. Wurtzel: Lizzie!
Grandmother: Did she say that she w...
Mrs. Wurtzel: It's OK. Everything is OK.
Elizabeth: Mom, believe me, if I was on drugs, I'd tell you.
Grandmother: People don't behave this way if they're not on drugs!
Elizabeth: I fucking do!
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Elizabeth: [screaming at her mother] I'M NOT YOUR GODDAMNED MONKEY!
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Elizabeth: Boys never used to notice me before. I wasn't even on their list of alternatives.
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Ruby: Lizzy, I'm not crying because you're mean. I just can't imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.
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Elizabeth: If only my life could be more like the movies. I want an angel to swoop down to me like he does to Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life" and talk me out of suicide. I've always waited for that one moment of truth to set me free and change my life forever. But he won't come. It doesn't happen that way.
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Elizabeth: I want to forget everything that has happened to me before. I want to freeze this moment, forever.
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Elizabeth: That article, it was just wish fulfilment. I was writing about how I wanted things to be. And the way people talked about it, the way you talked about it, it made it seem real.
Ruby: Well, maybe it can be.
Elizabeth: No. It was just a dream I held onto for way too long.
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Dr. Sterling: Have you had any drugs in the last 24 hours?
Elizabeth: No. Well, I guess I snorted some coke and smoked some pot but, uh, you know, that was just to make the ecstasy last longer.
Dr. Sterling: You sure you're not forgetting anything?
Elizabeth: Maybe a few beers?
Dr. Sterling: Did you ever think you might have a substance abuse problem?
Elizabeth: The only substance problem I have right now is that I need you to get me some tranq so I can come down off this fucking coke.
Dr. Sterling: And then what happens?
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Elizabeth: I don't think Rafe realized he'd just been appointed to save my life.
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Elizabeth: Hemingway has this classic moment in "The Sun Also Rises" when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, "Gradually, then suddenly." That's how depression hits. You wake up one morning, afraid that you're going to live.
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[last lines]
Elizabeth: All the drugs, all the therapy, fights, anger, guilt, Rafe, suicidal thoughts, all of that was part of some slow recovery process. The same way I went down, I came back up. Gradually and then suddenly. The pills weren't a cure-all, God knows, but they gave me breathing space which allowed me to start writing again. Only this time it wasn't as if my life depended on it.
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[Elizabeth has gone to visit her boyfriend Rafe, despite him insisting that he wants to be alone with his family, and has discovered that he has a severely mentally disabled sister]
Elizabeth: You get off on this.
Rafe: What?
Elizabeth: This does it for you.
[Rafe is very shocked]
Rafe: What are you talking about?
Elizabeth: You hid her from me. Don't you think there's a reason for that? Don't you think that tells me something?
Rafe: Oh, Christ.
Elizabeth: You're some kind of creepy voyeur. You like other people's misery.
Rafe: You're sick. You really are... You're really sick.
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Mrs. Wurtzel: I kill myself to get you to Harvard and you come back looking like a zombie!
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Elizabeth: I don't have to go to Harvard to become a writer.
Mrs. Wurtzel: Lizzie, what are you talking about? At Harvard you'll meet people. You'll get contacts, you'll have people to help you. I know what I'm talking about, Lizzie. I had my whole life ahead of me. You don't want to go to Harvard? Well, you just wait until you have no choices left, where you've got nothing. No one. No one who cares about you. Then you see how you feel.
Elizabeth: Mom, I didn't say I wasn't going.
Mrs. Wurtzel: Dr. Isaacs warned me.
Elizabeth: Mom, I said I'm going.
Mrs. Wurtzel: He told me you'd isolate. Stay in your room all day.
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Elizabeth: [about her father] When I was eight, we went to see The Last Waltz. He passed out on tranquillizers. I had to sit through the movie three fucking times before he woke up.
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[Elizabeth has been awake for days, writing obsessively]
Noah: I don't know how to say this to you, all right? But you are starting to smell.
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Noah: [looking at the writing Elizabeth is doing after being awake for days] This is just scribbling.
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Noah: She's turned into the Harvard bag lady!
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Sam: Lizzie, you gotta calm down, OK?
Elizabeth: That's not what you said when I had your dick in my mouth.
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Mrs. Wurtzel: What is wrong with you?
Elizabeth: Nothing.
Mrs. Wurtzel: Oh, God. You're not...
Elizabeth: Pregnant? No, Mom, I'm not pregnant. Anyway, it's the eighties, that would hardly be a problem.
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Noah: Lizzie, I love you dearly, really I do, but you can only hang out in my room if you don't drink or do drugs.
Elizabeth: Come on, you can't be serious.
Noah: Totally. "Just say no".
Elizabeth: But, Noah, there's no reason to be in your room sober.
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Elizabeth: I'm like a defective model.
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Ruby: When we're together, you're fine. You're fun, you...
Elizabeth: I'm faking it.
Ruby: Well, everybody does that.
Elizabeth: Not like me.
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Ruby: Look, we all have bad days.
Elizabeth: [narrating] This is what people say in situations when they don't know what else to say. Fuck, I don't know what to suggest either.
Ruby: I care about you, Lizzie.
Elizabeth: [narrating] What I want is for someone to understand. But they don't really. And that makes the platitudes harder to bear.
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Ruby: People want to help. All right? I want to help you but I don't know what to do.
Elizabeth: You know, I don't really need the company line right now, OK?
Ruby: [sighs] OK.
Elizabeth: [narrating] Jesus. Listen to me. All I see is the dark side of everything. Poor Ruby. I kill her joy. Look at her sad, discouraged face.
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Elizabeth: So, I guess this is the Freud part where I don't say anything and then you don't say anything... All of a sudden it's "Obviously you vish to sleep with your father".
Dr. Sterling: So I'm to take it you don't wish to sleep with your father?
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Elizabeth: I feel so stupid sitting in therapy. A lot of people had much harder childhoods than mine.
Dr. Sterling: We're not talking about other people. We're talking about you.
Elizabeth: [narrating] I'll give her that much, I'm the problem.
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Elizabeth: I just keep thinking that, if I could just be normal, you know, if I could just get out of bed in the morning, everything would be OK.
Dr. Sterling: OK, well, what do you think normal is?
Elizabeth: Most people, you know, they cut themselves, they put a band aid on, they keep going.
Dr. Sterling: And what do you do?
Elizabeth: I just keep bleeding.
Dr. Sterling: So you think that being normal is having a wound, putting a patch on it and then just go on with your life?
Elizabeth: Isn't that what functioning is? Isn't that what living is? You know, you keep going no matter what happens to you.
Dr. Sterling: Is that the way you want to live?
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Elizabeth: I've always helped my mother pick up boyfriends. The only one I never got a say in was the one that mattered. My dad.
Prozac Nation Quotes
Extended Reading
