Quotes from Emma Forrest

Have you ever eaten something appalling for breakfast, something really bad for you, a chocolate cake, and just thought, Fuck it, this is bad, I'd better keep going? Christ, this is making me feel horrible, I'd better have more?

People can only do what they can do.

My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out

New York is the first place I have ever felt safe.

There's so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.

I'm not rich, though everybody thinks I am.

I used to devour biographies of people like Natalie Wood and Marilyn.

The problem with writing a book about bulimia is that whenever you go to the washroom, people think you're throwing up.

Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn't, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.

When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.

If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.

I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.

I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.

Are you mine?" Yes. "Are you mine?" Yes. "Are you mine?" No. "No?" No. I loved being yours. But now I'm mine, which is all I ever was, in the end.

I never lie ? I am a blatantly truthful person about almost everything. My addiction (or disease as some call it) always lies. I have had very good relationships, but the addict in me always fucked them up. I fall in love quickly, it's a high that rivals drugs for a while. I am monogamous, but I always cheated with depression before the relationship fell apart. Addicts need best friends, healthy people need healthy relationships.

But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.

You're like Marilyn Monroe,' Ken tells me, which I take as a compliment and say a nervous "Thank You". Interrupting, he adds, 'You're all velvet and Velcro. Men want you because you're sexy and broken and when it gets too rough they can say "Hey! This toy is broken!" and toss you aside without feeling bad.

I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: "I can't live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheets". In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.

It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.

I'm not crazy or dangerous, just a bit eccentric and lonely.

Yes, I have patterns of love addiction. But I'm a woman. Of course I do.

Of course he freaked me out. Of course it's nothing to do with me. But none of that matters. He loved me and now he doesn't. I was everything to him and now I am nothing.

When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.

He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.