Marya Hornbacher famous quotes

03-28-2025

In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.
-- Marya Hornbacher

#Pain #Believe #You Like It
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 #Self #Psychosis
There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.
-- Marya Hornbacher

#Facts #Incredibles
The term â€œstarvation dietâ€ 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: â€œsuicide.
-- Marya Hornbacher

#Suicide #Mind #Calories
Soon madness has worn you down. Itâ€™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 youâ€™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 #Promise
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

#Grief #Moving #Book
And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
-- Marya Hornbacher

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

#Skeletons #Anorexia #Eating Disorder
Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
-- Marya Hornbacher

#Food #People #Eating Disorder
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
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
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

#Real #Fall #Long
It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger.
-- Marya Hornbacher

#Sick #Support #Eating Disorder
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
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
There is, in the end, the letting go.
-- Marya Hornbacher

#Letting Go #Chaos #Ends
Recovery isnâ€™t easy, at first. It takes time. It takes more work, sometimes, than you think youâ€™re willing to do. But it is worth every hard day, every tear, every terrified moment. Itâ€™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
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

#Believe #Fascination #Emptiness
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

#Long #Waiting #Silence
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

#Running #Hurt #Night
Crazy isnÂ´t always what they say it is. ItÂ´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.
-- Marya Hornbacher

#Girl #Crazy #Night
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

#Believe #Mind #Life Is
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

#Crazy #Ideas #Forever
...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.
-- Marya Hornbacher

#Fall #Curious #Feels
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

#Order #Secret #Different

You may also like:

Andrew Solomon
Writer
Ann Patchett
Author
Caroline Knapp
Writer
Christina Ricci
Actress
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Writer
Elyn Saks
Professor
Howard Gardner
Psychologist
Kay Redfield Jamison
Psychologist
Lauren Child
Writer
Laurie Halse Anderson
Writer
Lori Gottlieb
Writer
Lou Reed
Musician
Lucy Grealy
Poet
Patty Duke
Actress
Robert Lowell
Poet
Steven Levenkron
Writer
Susanna Kaysen
Author
Sylvia Plath
Poet
Vicki Pettersson
Author
William Styron
Novelist