Prozac Quotes

“In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. '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.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“How bitter were
the Prozac pills
of the last
few hundred mornings”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

“I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Lying in bed for a few days wouldn't help enact the kind of personality overhaul it would take to pull me away from my well-established pattern of mapping out escape routes, clinging to them like vines, and then watching as these lifeless forces suddenly pushed me away, though I continued to hold on for dear life.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I don't mean to sound like a spoiled brat. I know that into every sunny life a little rain must fall and all that, but in my case, the crisis-level hysteria is an all-too-recurring theme. The voices inside my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence And I've been on these goddamn pills for years.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Arson is almost as good as Prozac.”
― Joe Hill, The Fireman

“Serotonin, the "feel-good" brain chemical that is boosted by Prozac, depends on magnesium for its production and function.”
― Carolyn Dean, The Magnesium Miracle

“...I am you might say, chemically altered.”
― William Dudley, Antidepressants

“Some consider this a paralyzing moral dilemma. I don't. For me, having lived through episodes of major depression, this is a no-brainer. If there is a pill that will make you well, or make it less likely you will get sick, you take it. If Prozac hasn't saved my life, it has profoundly changed it.”
― William Dudley, Antidepressants

“Which God is the forgiving one, exactly? Old Testament, where He got His rocks off by smiting? Or New Testament, once Our Heavenly Father got Prozac?”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Find What You Love and Let It Kill You

“Prozac fundamentally and selectively alters personality without altering perception. This gives rise to disturbing questions: By using Prozac, are we fiddling with the human soul? Does the drug's effectiveness mean that we don't have a soul-that the mind is merely a glob of tissue in which electrical and chemical events occur?”
― William Dudley, Antidepressants

“It comes down to this: Who am I? Am I my no-chemicals-added self, no matter how unhappy I may be? Or Should I swallow this pill, achieve tranquility and risk obliterating a certain essential part of me?”
― William Dudley, Antidepressants

“..There are times when I have the uneasy sense that I am ceding a big part of my autonomy to the pharmaceutical industry. I wonder who I would be if I weren't taking Prozac. Maybe I would be a tortured genius....or maybe I would be just me, with periods of dank despondency.”
― William Dudley, Antidepressants

“I had a moment of what I can only call clearheadedness. The suffocating anxiety was gone, momentarily, and I felt a deep relief, a sense of sudden calm after eons of warfare inside my head. I had gotten so used to the noise that the quiet was unfamiliar. It was as if the evil beast that had been holding my head under water, trying to drown me, had suddenly let go.”
― William Dudley, Antidepressants

“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

“Some social highlights: Dead white males in malls.
Prayer breakfasts. Pay-phone sex. "Ring up as meat."
Oprah. The GNP. The contour sheet.
The painless death of History. The stick
Figures on Capitol Hill. Their rhetoric,
Gladly – no, rapturously (on Prozac) suffered!
Gay studies. Right to Lifers. The laugh track.

And clothes. Americans, blithe as the last straw,
Shrug off accountability by dressing
Younger than their kids – jeans, ski-pants, sneakers,
A baseball cap, a happy-face T-shirt . . .
Like first-graders we "love" our mother Earth,
Know she's been sick, and mean to care for her
When we grow up. Seeing my windbreaker,
People hail me with nostalgic awe. (Self-Portrait in TyvekTM Windbreaker)”
― James Merrill, Collected Poems

“Humor is the razor-sharp edge of the truth. It’s pain and anger made funny…because if you’re just angry all the time, all you’re going to do is burn yourself out and chase everybody away. That’s not how you change hearts and minds…passion is better than Prozac.”
― Robin Tyler