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.

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.

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.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

The joy of writing is the fullness of existence.

Charlotte made a promise to herself then and there: If I ever see someone fall, I'll ask if they're okay.

Colonel Henry Blake, a surgeon: "I can paint a barn with someone else's blood. I just can't stand to see my own.

A good editor fixes. A superb editor fixes without ruining the original message of your book as a superb translator does as well.

The law is a microphone for the voiceless.

I'm gonna spare the defeated. I'm gonna tame the proud.

What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone’s library is like peeking into their DNA.

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

One uncongenial guest can ruin a dinner more easily than a poor salad, and that is saying a great deal.