Marya Hornbacher Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Skeletons, Anorexia, Eating Disorder

  8 Copy quote

• You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Long, Needs

  4 Copy quote

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Anorexia, Flesh, Association

  4 Copy quote

• Madness is not what it seems. Time stops. All my life I've been obsessed with time, its motion and velocity, the way it works you over, the way it rushes you onward, a pebble turning in a brook. I've always been obsessed with where I'd go, and what I'd do, and how I would live. I've always harbored a desperate hope that I would make something of myself. Not then. Time stopped seeming so much like the thing that would transform me into something worthwhile and began to be inseparable from death. I spent my time merely waiting.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Waiting, Pebbles, Velocity

  4 Copy quote

• I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can't be that bad. It's only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They're just gross.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Mean, Worry, Bulimia

  4 Copy quote

• When I was growing up, I always felt there was an expectation that I would do one of two things: be great at something, or go crazy and become a total failure. There is no middle ground where I come from, and I am only now beginning to get a sense that there is a middle ground at all.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Growing Up, Crazy, Two

  5 Copy quote

• There are women in my closet, hanging on the hangers. a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lipsticks.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Makeup, Shoes, Clothes

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.30, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Wish, Skins, Cold

  4 Copy quote

• Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be alright.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Character, Brain, Costumes

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.30, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

• That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Dream, Nice, Fall

  4 Copy quote

• I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my own corporeality, my physical imposition on space.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Thinking, Space, Body

  Marya Hornbacher (2014). “Wasted Updated Edition: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.11, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

• ...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Fall, Curious, Feels

  4 Copy quote

• When I returned, everything was different. Everything was calm, and I felt very clean. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be. I had a secret. It was a guilty secret, certainly. But it was MY secret. I had something to hold on to. It was company. It kept me calm. It filled me up and emptied me out.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Order, Secret, Different

  Marya Hornbacher (2014). “Wasted Updated Edition: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.27, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Long, Silence, Waiting

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia”, p.6, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

• People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers – everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it´s actually just how you think. It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any. Because you are not even there.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• I am often drawn to what appear at first to be 'dark' or 'difficult' subjects, but which, upon further examination, are always and only reflections of the ways human beings attempt, however clumsily, badly, or well, to connect with others.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Dark, Reflection, Examination

  4 Copy quote

• My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You're so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I knew you'd leave.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Suicide, Giving Up, Hate

  8 Copy quote

• The idea of my future simultaneously thrilled and terrified me, like standing at the lip of a very sheer cliff- I could fly, or fall. I didn't know how to fly, and I didn't want to fall. So I backed away from the cliff and went in search of something that had a clear, solid trajectory for me to follow, like hopscotch.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Fall, Ideas, Want

  6 Copy quote

• It's really interesting to me how all of us can experience the exact same event, and yet come away with wildly disparate interpretations of what happened. We each have totally different ideas of what was said, what was intended, and what really took place.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Ideas, Interesting, Different

  7 Copy quote

• And so I am feeling numb. It's a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Numbness, Voice, Water

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

• When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Character, Nonfiction, Deals

  7 Copy quote

• I was perpetually grief-stricken when I finished a book, and would slide down from my sitting position on the bed, put my cheek on the pillow and sigh for a long time. It seemed there would never be another book. It was all over, the book was dead. It lay in its bent cover by my hand. What was the use? Why bother dragging the weight of my small body down to dinner? Why move? Why breathe? The book had left me, and there was no reason to go on.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Grief, Moving, Book

  6 Copy quote

• There's childhood and early onset bipolar, but it transitions in your early adulthood into something a little bit different, and extremely severe. It was at that time that my impulse control just went out the window. Impulse control when you're manic just disappears.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Impulse Control, Childhood, Bipolar

  5 Copy quote

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Normal, Made, Clear

  4 Copy quote

• When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?

  Marya Hornbacher

  Teaching, Writing, Creative Nonfiction

  4 Copy quote

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