Marya Hornbacher Quotes

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.

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

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?

...Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.

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

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.

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.

I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.

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.

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.

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

When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

You will miss her sometimes. Bear in mind she's trying to kill you. Bear in mind you have a life to live.

We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.

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

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.

The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive.

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.

There is, in the end, the letting go.

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 know for a fact that sickness is easier, but health is more interesting.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.

So many means of self-destruction, so little time.

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

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

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.

I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like- the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you.

...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.

The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.

I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can't be that bad. It's only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They're just gross.

I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.

My parents say that even as a very, very little kid, the way that I acted was dramatically different from other little kids.

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

My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!

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

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.

Children take in more information than we'd like to believe.

I'm a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.

You can't teach an ear, you can't teach talent, but you can teach people who have those things not to just fly by the seat of their pants.

You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.

After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.

The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying.

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

People take the feeling of full for granted.

The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.