Marya Hornbacher Quotes

When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

We know we need, and so we acquire and eat and eat, past the point of bodily fullness, trying to sate a greater need. Ashamed of this, we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how to not-need.

Anorexia and bulimia seem to be getting much more common in boys, men, and women of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds; they are also becoming more common in racial groups previously thought to be impervious to the problem.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Starvation is incredibly frightening when it finally sets in with a vengeance. And when it does,you are surprised. You hadn't meant this. You say: Wait, not this. And then it sucks you under and you drown.

There is, in the end, the letting go.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

People take the feeling of full for granted.

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

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