Marya Hornbacher Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Pain, Believe, You Like It

  49 Copy quote

• Crazy isn´t always what they say it is. It´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Girl, Crazy, Night

  4 Copy quote

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Dying, Life Is, Biggest Fear

  4 Copy quote

• The problem is that you don't just choose recovery. You have to keep choosing recovery, over and over and over again. You have to make that choice 5-6 times each day. You have to make that choice even when you really don't want to. It's not a single choice, and it's not easy.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Recovery, Choices, Each Day

  16 Copy quote

• You will not stop. The pain is necessary, especially the pain of hunger. It reassures you that you are strong, can withstand anything, that you are not a slave to your body, you don't have to give in to its whining.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Strong, Pain, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• I either want to be completely recovered or completely emaciated. It's the in between that I can't stand, the limbo of failure where you know that you haven't done your best at one or the other: dying or living.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Dying, Done, Want

  11 Copy quote

• All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Memories, Emotional, Long

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.33, Harper Collins

  5 Copy quote

• We think of bulimia and anorexia as either a bizarre psychosis, or as a quirky little habit, a phase, or as a thing that women just do. We forget that it is a violent act, that it bespeaks a profound level of anger toward and fear of the self.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Thinking, Psychosis, Violent Acts

  20 Copy quote

• Recovery isn’t easy, at first. It takes time. It takes more work, sometimes, than you think you’re willing to do. But it is worth every hard day, every tear, every terrified moment. It’s worth it, because the trade-off is this: you let go of your eating disorder, and you get back your life.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Letting Go, Recovery, Thinking

  18 Copy quote

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Facts, Incredibles, Left

  13 Copy quote

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Interesting, Facts, Sickness

  6 Copy quote

• I don't think people realize, when they're just getting started on an eating disorder or even when they're in the grip of one, that it is not something that you just "get over." For the vast majority of eating-disordered people, it is something that will haunt you for the rest of your life. You may change your behavior, change your beliefs about yourself and your body, give up that particular way of coping in the world. You may learn, as I have, that you would rather be a human than a human's thin shell. You may get well. But you never forget.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Giving Up, Get Well, Thinking

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.10, Harper Collins

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Memories, Brain, Madness

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.175, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Together, Want, Way

  "Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia". Book by Marya Hornbacher, www.glamour.com. 1998.

  5 Copy quote

• • Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving—you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy—and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves are intense and focused. Your sense of power is very, very intense. You are not aware, however, that you are quickly becoming addicted.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Two, Smell, Numbers

  9 Copy quote

• 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?

  Marya Hornbacher

  Desire, Want, Underestimate

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Suicide, Mind, Calories

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Wall, Glasses, Mirrors

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.14, Harper Collins

  13 Copy quote

• At times it may seem worse - harder, at least - to live through the despair of this loss without the temporary comfort of our addictive behaviour. We cannot drown our sorrows. We must face the fact that we don’t know, really, where we are, how we got here, how long the pain will last, or how to move past it. That uncertainty may be the most painful part of not knowing a God: no one is there to reassure us that a God will take the pain and confusion away. We simply don’t know. And we have no way to numb ourselves or to forget the condition we’re in.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Pain, Moving, Loss

  4 Copy quote

• Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you’re worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Believe, Laughing, Bipolar

  17 Copy quote

• In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of the selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Fear, Sleep, Simple

  11 Copy quote

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Doe, Alive, Facts

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Depression, Reality, Mad

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.118, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  54 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Desire, Levels, Gestures

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.9, Harper Collins

  6 Copy quote

• It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Sick, Support, Stronger

  10 Copy quote

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