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

• 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

• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

• 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

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Interesting, Facts, Sickness

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Facts, Incredibles, Left

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• 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

• • 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

  Morning, Heart, Kitchen

  Marya Hornbacher (2008). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.266, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Doe, Alive, Facts

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• 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

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• 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

• If I had been a different sort of person, maybe less impressionable, less intense, less fearful, less utterly dependent upon the perceptions of others - maybe then I would not have bought the cultural party line that thinness is the be-all and end-all of goals. Maybe if my family had not been in utter chaos most of the time, maybe if my parents were a little better at dealing with their own lives maybe if I'd gotten help sooner, or if I'd gotten different help, maybe if I didn't so fiercely cherish my secret, or if I were not such a good liar, or were not quite so empty inside... maybe.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Liars, Party, Goal

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

  Marya Hornbacher

  Food, People, Eating Disorder

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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

  6 Copy quote

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