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

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.

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.

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.

Our worship as believers cannot be accepted we honor others

I travel all over the world, usually 10 months out of the year. I stay at a lot of hotels, and the ones I like best are clean and not complicated. You go to bed and say, 'Wow, I feel comfortable.'

Those who earn money know best how to spend it.

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

Avoid retirement playgrounds like poison, because that's exactly what they are.

If you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also.

the virtue of imagination has this in common with the virtue of courage. Without it, you are less good: with it, you are not necessarily better.

Only during the action is the idea of matter influenced.

How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society.