Marya Hornbacher Quotes & Sayings

We take a certain sick pride in the fact that we know the caloric and fat content of every possible food on the planet, and have an understandable disdain for nutritionists who attempt to tell us the caloric content of anything, when we are the gods of caloric content and have delusions of nutritional omniscience, when said nutritionist will attempt to explain that the average woman needs a daily diet of 2,000 or more calories when we ourselves have been doing JUST FUCKING FINE on 500. — Marya Hornbacher

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

The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying. — Marya Hornbacher

One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

That which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out. When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force that is ourselves. The experience of living in this world, bound by a body, space, and time, woven into the fabric of human history, human connection and human life. This is the force that feels, and thinks and gives us consciousness at all. It is the deepest, most elemental, most integral part of who we are; it is who we are. — Marya Hornbacher

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

My relationships with both my mother and father are good. We spent several difficult years hashing over the problems and the past, and worked out a fairly solid middle ground. I wouldn't say my relationship with either of them - they're no longer together - is exactly typical, but that would be difficult after all we went through. — Marya Hornbacher

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

There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again. — Marya Hornbacher

I began to measure things in absence instead of presence. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin. — Marya Hornbacher

I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death. — Marya Hornbacher

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

This is the weird aftermath, when it is not exactly over, and yet you have given it up. You go back and forth in your head, often, about giving it up. It's hard to understand, when you are sitting there in your chair, having breakfast or whatever, that giving it up is stronger than holding on, that "letting yourself go" could mean you have succeeded rather than failed. You eat your goddamn Cheerios and bicker with the bitch in your head that keeps telling you you're fat and weak: Shut up, you say, I'm busy, leave me alone. When she leaves you alone, there's a silence and a solitude that will take some getting used to. You will miss her sometimes ... There is, in the end, the letting go. — Marya Hornbacher

Why must the power of the female body cancel the power of the female mind? Are we so afraid of having both? — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

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

Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

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

No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. — Marya Hornbacher

...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall. — Marya Hornbacher

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

For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

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

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

That's the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall. — Marya Hornbacher

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

I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters. — Marya Hornbacher

You know those afternoons," he asks, drawing a shaking breath, "where you're just going along, doing fine, and then afternoon comes and it feels like you've just got the wind knocked out of you and everything is wrong?" He sighs and slowly pushes himself so he's sitting upright. His shoulders are slumped. "That's all," he says. "It's just one of those afternoons."
We are silent for a minute. Then he lies back down on the couch.
I should say I love him. I should say it will be all right. But it won't.
I walk down the hall to my bedroom. I lie down on my side and stare at the wall, the blue-flowered wallpaper next to my nose. Despite my best efforts, I start to cry.
I know those afternoons. — Marya Hornbacher

That nothing - not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state - will make the past disappear. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

I know for a fact that sickness is easier, but health is more interesting. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children take in more information than we'd like to believe. — Marya Hornbacher

For a long time I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something had been confirmed: I was worth giving a shit about; I was getting to be a successful sick person. Sick is when they say something. Of course, I had been sick for five years. But now, now maybe I was really sick. Maybe I wasgetting good at this, good enough to scare people. Maybe I would almost die, and balance just there, at the edge of the cliff, wavering while they gasped and clutched one another's arms, and win acclaim for my death-defying stunts. — Marya Hornbacher

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

There is, in the end, the letting go. — Marya Hornbacher

And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had a love affair with books, with characters and their words. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

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

I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what you feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselves together somewhere in the lower abdomen and pulse. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

So many means of self-destruction, so little time. — Marya Hornbacher

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

I didn't particularly want to live much longer than that. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be require to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do - it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone - and be done with it. Go to sleep. — Marya Hornbacher

comprehending little and caring less. — Marya Hornbacher

The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand, it is the fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you do have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something really big. — Marya Hornbacher

Back in Minneapolis, I said I would go to American. I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgment from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense, pretty much. 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. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

There was a time when I was unable to get out of bed because my body, its muscles eating themselves away, refused to sit up. There was a time when the lies rolled off my tongue with ease, when it was far more important to me to self-destruct than to admit I had a problem, let alone allow anyone to help. — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

Uncle Joe used to spend a fair amount of time in the loony bin. My family wasn't bothered by his regular trips to and from 'the facility'
they'd shrug and say, There goes Joe, and they'd put him in the car and take him in. One day Uncle Frank ... was driving Uncle Joe to the crazy place. When they got there, Joe asked Frank to drop him off at the door while Frank went and parked the car. Frank didn't think much of it, and dropped him off.
Joe went inside, smiled at the nurse, and said, 'Hi. I'm Frank Hornbacher. I'm here to drop off Joe. He likes to park the car, so I let him do that. He'll be right in.' The nurses nodded knowingly. The real Frank walked in. The nurse took his arm and guided him away, murmuring the way nurses always do, while Frank hollered in protest, insisting that he was Frank, not Joe. Joe, quite pleased with himself, gave Frank a wave and left. — Marya Hornbacher

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

There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose. — Marya Hornbacher

I threw up again that night, half-afraid that my eyeballs would explode. But it was, by far, more important that I get rid of dinner. Of course, by then, throwing up was the only way I knew how to deal with fear. That paradox would begin to run my life: to know that what you are doing is hurting you, maybe killing you, and to be afraid of that fact
but to cling to the idea that this will save you, it will, in the end, make things okay. — Marya Hornbacher

Warned me that the tenuous balance that exists in my brain is easily set off kilter, but like everything else he said, — Marya Hornbacher

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

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

Men are embarrassingly easy to seduce. — Marya Hornbacher

Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times. — Marya Hornbacher

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