Marya Hornbacher Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

• I have not lost my fascination with death. I have not become a noticeably less intense person. I have not, nor will I ever, completely lose the longing for that something, that thing that I believe will fill an emptiness inside me. I do believe that the emptiness was made greater by the things that I did to myself.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Believe, Fascination, Emptiness

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• Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you're going, or why. It tells you it doesn't matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that water patch on the road up ahead. You will drive until you find it, the treasure, the thing you most desire. You will never find it. Madness may mock you so long you will die of the search. Or it will tire of you, turn its back, oblivious as you go flying. The car is beside you, smoking, belly-up, still spinning its wheels.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Car, Long, Water

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.114, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Food, People, Eating Disorder

  7 Copy quote

• [I] learned ... that friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone. That nothing-not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state-will make the past disappear. Only time and patience heal things. I learned that cutting up your arms in an attempt to make the pain move from inside to outside, from soul to skin, is futile. That death is a cop-out. I tried all of these things.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Depression, Sex, Pain

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Missing, Anorexia, Mind

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• People take the feeling of full for granted.

  Marya Hornbacher

  People, Feelings, Granted

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• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  World, Length, Theory

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Way, Enough

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• In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being seriously trivial.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Book, Writing, Epic

  4 Copy quote

• Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school,athletics,artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school,drop out,quit jobs,leave lovers,move,lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather,we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule,most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Jobs, Moving, School

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• You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Suicide, Distance, Self Harm

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• This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don’t really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Hate, Eating Disorder, Would Be

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• I have a type of bipolar that swings up and down all day long. There are significant mood swings within a day, within a week, within a month. I go through at least four major episodes a year. That's really the definition of bipolar rapid cycle. But I have ultra-rapid, so I have tiny little episodes all day long.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Swings, Years, Long

  9 Copy quote

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Yellow, Joy, Contradicting

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.248, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for worse, made by default.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Choices, Done, Earth

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• There is, in the end, the letting go.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Letting Go, Chaos, Ends

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• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Waiting, Doe, Vengeance

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• I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Crawling, Grew, Edges

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.7, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

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• I do have faith. I don't have faith that a God exists, nor do I have faith that one does not; I have absolute faith that I do not know, cannot know, am only human, am an infinitesimal creature packed onto a cramped planet crowded with seven billion bodies, and as many yearning hearts, and as many questioning minds.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Heart, Mind, Doe

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• I do not remember very many things from the inside out. I do not remember what it felt like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Hands, Break Even, People

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.17, Harper Collins

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• After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Silence, Speak, Lifetime

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Lonely, Reality, Brain

  Marya Hornbacher (2008). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.326, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Real, Fall, Long

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.101, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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