Top 100 Marya Hornbacher Quotes
#1. Warned me that the tenuous balance that exists in my brain is easily set off kilter, but like everything else he said,
Marya Hornbacher
#2. Why must the power of the female body cancel the power of the female mind? Are we so afraid of having both?
Marya Hornbacher
#3. In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.
Marya Hornbacher
#4. Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
Marya Hornbacher
#6. 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.
Marya Hornbacher
#8. Having a normal person around me made it poingnantly clear to me that I was out of control.
Marya Hornbacher
#9. The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
Marya Hornbacher
#10. 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
#11. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Children take in more information than we'd like to believe.
Marya Hornbacher
#17. 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
#18. There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future
Marya Hornbacher
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.
Marya Hornbacher
#22. I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters.
Marya Hornbacher
#23. Were I to put myself on ... one of those online dating things, I would not include in my profile that I'm regularly hospitalized for psychosis. But I do know that when I get really bad, there is a place for me to go where I will feel better.
Marya Hornbacher
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
Marya Hornbacher
#28. 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.
Marya Hornbacher
#29. I know for a fact that sickness is easier, but health is more interesting.
Marya Hornbacher
#30. When you believe that you are not worthwhile in and of yourself, in the back of your mind you also begin to believe that life is not worthwhile in and of itself. It is only worthwhile insofar as it relates to your crusade. It is a kamikaze mission.
Marya Hornbacher
#31. 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
#32. I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife.
Marya Hornbacher
#33. 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
#34. That's the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.
Marya Hornbacher
#35. I am mad. The thought calms me. I don't have to try to be sane anymore. It's over. I sleep
Marya Hornbacher
#37. 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
#38. We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
Marya Hornbacher
#40. I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?
Marya Hornbacher
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.
Marya Hornbacher
#44. You can't teach an ear, you can't teach talent, but you can teach people who have those things not to just fly by the seat of their pants.
Marya Hornbacher
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. My parents say that even as a very, very little kid, the way that I acted was dramatically different from other little kids.
Marya Hornbacher
#49. The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.
Marya Hornbacher
#51. Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.
Marya Hornbacher
#52. Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
Marya Hornbacher
#54. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive.
Marya Hornbacher
#56. That nothing - not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state - will make the past disappear.
Marya Hornbacher
#57. Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull.
Marya Hornbacher
#58. I am in the zone, the perfect balance between manic and drunk, I am mellow, I'm cool, cool as cats. I've found the answer, the thing that takes the edge off, smoothes out the madness, sends me sailing, lifts me up and lets me fly.
Marya Hornbacher
#59. As I head back up the stairs, I hear the dryer make a sound of great mechanical distress, nnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, and I pause for only a moment before I decide that if I leave, I will no longer intimidate the machine, and it will then do its job very well without me.
Marya Hornbacher
#60. 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
#61. He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.
Marya Hornbacher
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy Person. That's what we'd suspected all along, what I'd been working so hard to disprove, what might be true. I preferred, by far, being dead.
Marya Hornbacher
#65. I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.
Marya Hornbacher
#66. And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California at least once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.
Marya Hornbacher
#67. I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.
Marya Hornbacher
#68. We were at another funeral party. I wasn't sure who had died this time, but it was a suicide, and upsetting because it was completely out of season. No on killed themselves in summertime. It was rude.
Marya Hornbacher
#69. For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.
Marya Hornbacher
#70. 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.
Marya Hornbacher
#71. After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.
Marya Hornbacher
#72. I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.
Marya Hornbacher
#73. If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I
Marya Hornbacher
#74. Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times.
Marya Hornbacher
#75. 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
#76. Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.
Marya Hornbacher
#77. 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
#78. The last place I want to be is the hospital, but I'm not stupid. I know when it's time to go in. I am so terrified of myself and of the vast, frightening world, that the psych ward, with its safe locked doors, sounds like a relief.
Marya Hornbacher
#79. No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.
Marya Hornbacher
#80. 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
#81. I'm sick. It's true. It isn't going to go away. All my life, I've thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I've always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I'd be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone else.
Marya Hornbacher
#82. It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo.7 To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control.
Marya Hornbacher
#83. It does not hit you until later. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw. First it is numb. Then a shock of pain rips through the body. And then, every winter after, it aches.
Marya Hornbacher
#84. 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
#85. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.
Marya Hornbacher
#90. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
Marya Hornbacher
#91. I was used to sleeping with people because I endlessly found myself in identical situations where it was easier to just fuck them than to say no.
Marya Hornbacher
#92. I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.
Marya Hornbacher
#93. When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.
Marya Hornbacher
#94. Here's the hell of it: madness doesn't announce itself. There isn't time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay; it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge.
Marya Hornbacher
#95. My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless ... I'm not going to have a happy ending.
Marya Hornbacher
#96. My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!
Marya Hornbacher
#97. I missed him so much that it felt like a physical pain in the area below my ribs. I opened my mouth to accommodate it. I put my hand to it. A hollow, aching, piercing place.
Marya Hornbacher
#98. Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier.
Marya Hornbacher
#99. 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
#100. The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying.
Marya Hornbacher
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
