Marya Hornbacher Quotes

“Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.”

“You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.”

“In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.”

“No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.”

“For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.”

“And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”

“That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.”

“And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.”

“When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.”

“There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.”

“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”

“Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?”

“It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.”

“I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.”

“The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.”

“Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.”

“He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.”

“There are women in my closet, hanging on the hangers. a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lipsticks.”

“My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless… I'm not going to have a happy ending.”

“All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.”

“Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.”

“Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.”

“The term “starvation diet” refers to 900 calories a day. I was on one-third of a starvation diet. What do you call that? One word that comes to my mind: “suicide.”

“I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.”

“I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You're dying.”

“When you believe that you are not worthwhile in and of yourself, in the back of your mind you also begin to believe that life is not worthwhile in and of itself. It is only worthwhile insofar as it relates to your crusade. It is a kamikaze mission.”

“But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.”

“Having a normal person around me made it poingnantly clear to me that I was out of control.”

“My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.”

“I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.”

“Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.”

“… painfully curious… about how it feels to fall.”

“Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.”

“My most salient memories”