Top 100 Marya's 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. The incredible new medical technology has made it possible for highly disciplined teams of surgeons ... to keep stricken organisms alive even if the brain is irretrievably damaged or lung and heart incapable of functioning without mechanical help. Now it is not dust to dust, but human to vegetable.
Marya Mannes
#4. 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
#5. In an age where the lowered eyelid is just a sign of fatigue, the delicate game of love is pining away. Freud and flirtation are poor companions.
Marya Mannes
#6. The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.
Marya Mannes
#7. 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
#8. Women are repeatedly accused of taking things personally. I cannot see any other honest way of taking them.
Marya Mannes
#10. 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
#11. If American men are obsessed with money, American women are obsessed with weight. The men talk of gain, the women talk of loss, and I do not know which talk is the more boring.
Marya Mannes
#12. To be successful in the world of art you must, of course, have talent, although very small talents have gone very far in this age. Just as the microphone gave volume to voices that had none, so does the science of press-agentry magnify limited skills into highly saleable properties.
Marya Mannes
#14. Self-restraint may be alien to the human temperament, but humanity without restraint will dig its own grave.
Marya Mannes
#15. Having a normal person around me made it poingnantly clear to me that I was out of control.
Marya Hornbacher
#16. The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
Marya Hornbacher
#17. 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
#18. Fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.
Marya Mannes
#19. 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
#20. A familiar story, Marya instructs herself - a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn't a soul of her own.
Joyce Carol Oates
#21. Yes," he growled, "yes, I will put you there and turn out the light in your eyes and come to stare at you for centuries, to pore over you, because you are mine, my treasure, my hoard, and I cannot keep you and I cannot let you go.
Catherynne M Valente
#22. The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.
Marya Mannes
#23. To know the good is to react against the bad. Indifference is the mark of deprivation.
Marya Mannes
#25. Everybody likes to see somebody else get caught for the vices practiced by themselves.
Marya Mannes
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Marya watched from the upper floor as once again the birds gathered in the great oak tree, sniping and snapping for the last autumn nuts, stolen from squirrels and hidden in bark-cracks, which every winged creature knows are the most bitter of all nuts, like old sorrows sitting heavy on the tongue.
Catherynne M Valente
#30. I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.
Catherynne M Valente
#31. Nikolushka and his upbringing, Andre, and religion were Princess Marya's comforts and joys; but, besides that, since every human being needs his personal hope, Princess Marya had in the deepest recesses of her soul a hidden dream and hope, which provided the main comfort of her life.
Leo Tolstoy
#32. All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.
Marya Mannes
#33. Children take in more information than we'd like to believe.
Marya Hornbacher
#34. To be at peace with self, to find company and nourishment in self-this would be the test of the free and productive psyche.
Marya Mannes
#35. Borders are scratched across the hearts of men By strangers with a calm, judicial pen, And when the borders bleed we watch with dread The lines of ink across the map turn red.
Marya Mannes
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Never 'it,' never 'it,' " Marya chided. "None of God's creatures is an 'it,' even if they're not a boy or a girl or a mammal or a pretty bird. Call them 'he' or she' and be a little wrong, but never take away their individuality like that.
Mira Grant
#39. 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
#40. A high standard of living is usually accompanied by a low standard of thinking.
Marya Mannes
#41. Television and radio violence was considered by most experts of minimal importance as a contributory cause of youthful killing ... there were always enough experts to assure the public that crime and violence had nothing to do with crime and violence.
Marya Mannes
#42. Whatever Marya's state, whatever mine, I will find her, and I will carry her home.
Josiah Bancroft
#43. 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
#44. Revelation is the marriage of knowing and feeling.
Marya Mannes
#45. Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.
Catherynne M Valente
#46. You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.
Marya Hornbacher
#47. I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters.
Marya Hornbacher
#48. An American who can make money, invoke God, and be no better than his neighbor, has nothing to fear but truth itself.
Marya Mannes
#49. In the race for money some men may come first, but man comes last.
Marya Mannes
#50. It is not enough to show people how to live better: there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better.
Marya Mannes
#51. It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.
Catherynne M Valente
#52. It's never what you say, but how you make it sound sincere.
Marya Mannes
#53. 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
#54. At night, she whispered into the pipes: I hate it here. Please take me away, let me be something other than Marya, something magical, with a round belly. Frighten me, make me cry, only come back.
Catherynne M Valente
#56. The ultimate cynicism is to suspend judgment so that you are not judged.
Marya Mannes
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. They were waiting for Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, known in society as le terrible dragon, a lady celebrated not for her wealth or distinction, but for her straightforward speech and the frank simplicity of her manners.
Leo Tolstoy
#60. After that, Marya Morevna understood that she belonged to her secret and it belonged to her. They had struck a bloody bargain between them. Keep me and obey me, the secret said to her, for I am your husband and I can destroy you.
Catherynne M Valente
#61. Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.
Catherynne M Valente
#62. In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.
Marya Mannes
#63. The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other.
Marya Mannes
#64. Artists never make wars. They are too busy making life out of the matter of their visions.
Marya Mannes
#65. It is a marvellous thing to be physically a woman if only to know the marvels of a man.
Marya Mannes
#67. By the age of fifty, you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.
Marya Mannes
#68. The car, by bisecting the human outline, diminishes it, producing a race of half-people in a motion not of their own making
Marya Mannes
#69. I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
Marya Hornbacher
#70. The greatest miracle of all, the human being.
Marya Mannes
#71. The real demon is success-the anxieties engendered by this quest are relentless, degrading, corroding. What is worse, there is no end to this escalation of desire.
Marya Mannes
#72. 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
#73. The right to choose death when life no longer holds meaning is not only the next liberation but the last human right.
Marya Mannes
#74. I know for a fact that sickness is easier, but health is more interesting.
Marya Hornbacher
#75. Hoary idea, in any case, expecting a woman to surrender her name to her husband's in exchange for his. Why? Would any man submerge his identity and heritage to the woman he wed?
Marya Mannes
#76. That's the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.
Marya Hornbacher
#77. I am mad. The thought calms me. I don't have to try to be sane anymore. It's over. I sleep
Marya Hornbacher
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Just you wait. Papa Koschei is coming, coming, coming, over the hills on his red horse and he's got bells on his boots and a ring in his poket and he knows your name, Marya Morevna.
Catherynne M Valente
#81. 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
#82. Certain kinds of people become Republicans and certain kinds of people become Democrats, and ... it's more than a matter of party affiliation. It's a way of thinking and being.
Marya Mannes
#83. Know the difference between Giant and Jumbo? Between two-ounce and a big two-ounce? Between a quart and a full quart? What's a tall 24-inch? What does Extra Long mean? Who's kidding who?
Marya Mannes
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.
Marya Hornbacher
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Republicans seems to me to be chiefly concerned with holding on to what they have: in society, it's position, or respectability, or what you will; in business, of course, it's profit.
Marya Mannes
#97. 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
#98. Before you are beginning your first step, let's pray first.
Marya Sy
#99. It is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter.
Marya Mannes
#100. 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
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