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 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.

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?