Marya Quotes & Sayings

They touch life with gloves on. They're pretending about something all the time. Pretending quite nice and decent things, of course. But still ... '
'Everybody pretends,' Marya was thinking. 'French people pretend every bit as much, only about different things and not so obviously. She'll know that when she's been here as long as I have. — Jean Rhys

After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak. — Marya Hornbacher

The right to choose death when life no longer holds meaning is not only the next liberation but the last human right. — Marya Mannes

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

Promiscuous ... was a word I had never applied to myself. Possibly no one ever does, for it is a sordid word, reducing many valuable moments to nothing more than doglike copulation. — Marya Mannes

Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism pleasurable to many, but we don't like to think about that. We don't like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on, be both a top and a bottom, and experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow. — 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

Performance is an act of faith. — Marya Mannes

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'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

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

Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow The faucet leak, and learn to leave them so. — Marya Mannes

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

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

There is a little word that we can say to others now. "Thank You Very Much". — Marya Sy

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive. — Marya Mannes

On Broadway money rules. Like a host of vultures, the ticket brokers, the speculators, the craft unions, the agents, the backers, the real estate owners move in on the creative body and take their bite. The world of dreams breathes in an iron lung; and without this mechanical pumping it dies. — Marya Mannes

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

And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking. — Catherynne M Valente

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

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

We pity or condemn the communist peoples of the world for being bound in the chains of doctrine. So are we. Our doctrine runs as follows: Our Way is the Only Way. — Marya Mannes

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves. — Marya Mannes

When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger. — Catherynne M Valente

Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely - Hamlet whispered truths too cruel to be borne, every word in Lear hooked in flesh and could not be dislodged. As for Wilde, Hobbes, Schopenhauer . . . even cynicism, Marya saw, can't save you. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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

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 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

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

Everybody likes to see somebody else get caught for the vices practiced by themselves. — Marya Mannes

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

It would be good," thought Prince Andrei, glancing at the little image that his sister had hung around his neck with such reverence and emotion, "It would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Princess Marya . How good it would be to know where to seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave! How happy and at peace I should be if I could now say:" Lord have mercy on me! ... But to whom should I say this? To some power
indefinable and incomprehensible, to which I not only cannot appeal, but which I cannot express in words
The Great All or Nothing," he said to himself, "or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Marya? There is nothing certain, nothing except the nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important! — Leo Tolstoy

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

[I] learned ... that friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone. That nothing-not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state-will make the past disappear. Only time and patience heal things. I learned that cutting up your arms in an attempt to make the pain move from inside to outside, from soul to skin, is futile. That death is a cop-out. I tried all of these things. — Marya Hornbacher

I have a type of bipolar that swings up and down all day long. There are significant mood swings within a day, within a week, within a month. I go through at least four major episodes a year. That's really the definition of bipolar rapid cycle. But I have ultra-rapid, so I have tiny little episodes all day long. — 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

They had left the demigod they now called the Voice in a government creche in orbit. The Archipelago had facilities for newly born artificial sentients - a revelation that still astonished and unsettled Marya when she thought about it. The Voice had gone willingly into the maw of the jewellike orbiting structure; as the doors closed she had looked back, but Marya could read nothing in her gaze - neither hope nor fear. — Karl Schroeder

I am mad. The thought calms me. I don't have to try to be sane anymore. It's over. I sleep — 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

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

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

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation. — Catherynne M Valente

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

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

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

Working with heart, then enjoy our time. — Marya Sy

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

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

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

The night I shaved it off altogether, a Staff named Mark, whose take-no-prisoners approach I respected and feared, pulled me aside, looked me hard in the face, and said, Marya, your hair. I said, Yeah, so? crossing my arms in front of me. He said, It's harsh. I said, Yeah, well. 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 down the hall. I didn't want it to be me underneath. I wanted to kill the me underneath. The 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 behaviour for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. — 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

I have argued that when we encounter other humans we experience them first as persons, and cannot help but do so. This means that in order to see a human person as an animal or organism we must abstract from the totality of our experience. My suggestion is that we take this fact seriously in understanding the ontology of everyday objects. According to this proposal a "human animal" or "human organism" is not a thing in its own right, but rather a particular perspective we take on ourselves and our lives, one that attends only to our purely biological functions. — Marya Schechtman

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

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

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

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 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

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

A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time. — Marya Mannes

The suppression of civil liberties is too many less a matter for horror than the curtailment of the freedom to profit. — Marya Mannes

The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other. — Marya Mannes

Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference. — Marya Hornbacher

People take the feeling of full for granted. — Marya Hornbacher

They are regular brigands, especially Dolokhov," replied the visitor. "He is a son of Marya Ivanovna Dolokhova, such a worthy woman, but there, just fancy! Those three got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a carriage, and set off with it to visit some actresses! The police tried to interfere, and what did the young men do? They tied a policeman and the bear back to back and put the bear into the Moyka Canal. And there was the bear swimming about with the policeman on his back! — Leo Tolstoy

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

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

Why is it safe for you and not for me?" whispered Marya Morevna.
"Because you're still a girl." The vintovnik grinned. "Girls have to obey rules. Chyerti break them. — Catherynne M Valente

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

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

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

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

But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met - the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did - the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over. — Catherynne M Valente

This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don't really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you. — Marya Hornbacher

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

Self-restraint may be alien to the human temperament, but humanity without restraint will dig its own grave. — Marya Mannes

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

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

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

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

We feign disinterest and laugh, and creep into the kitchen some nights, a triangle of light spilled on the floor form the fridge, shoveling cold casseroles, ice cream, jelly, cheese, into our mouths, swallowing without chewing as we listen to the steady, echoing tisk-tisk-tisk of the clock. I have done this. Millions of people have done this. There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There is a hunger for something, and we never know quite what it is, only that it is a hunger, so we eat. — Marya Hornbacher

The latter part of her stay in Voronezh had been the happiest period in Princess Marya's life. Her love for Rostov was not then a source of torment or agitation to her. That love had by then filled her whole soul and become an inseparable part of herself, and she no longer struggled against it. Of late Princess Marya was convinced- though she never clearly in so many words admitted it to herself- that she loved and was beloved. — Leo Tolstoy

Don't worry," Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. "My old bones will follow yours soon enough. — Catherynne M Valente

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

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

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble. — Marya Mannes

All people talk of money sometimes, everywhere. But not for all people, everywhere, is money the addiction, the obsession, the stimulant, that it seems to be in New York. It is a large part of the clamor, and it is the voice - quite literally - of the man in the street. — Marya Mannes

All really great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction. — Marya Mannes

The Republicans think they have a corner on morality ... — Marya Mannes

Generosity with strings is not generosity: it is a deal. — Marya Mannes

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

Marya Morevna! Don't you know anything? Girls must be very, very careful to care only for ribbons and magazines and wedding rings. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but kisses and theater and dancing. They must never read Pushkin; they must never say clever things; they must never have sly eyes or wear their hair loose and wander around barefoot, or they will draw his attention! — Catherynne M Valente

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