Quotes from 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

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.

Being here, living now, recognizing our smallness, is a spiritual practice. It allows us to be at peace with our humanity. It humbles us and grants us permission to fumble, and not know, and fail, and also to take pleasure in the small triumphs of our days.

I would disappear, only to come home reinvented. I would be unrecognizable upon my fleeting returns. This fantasy was realized, but not quite the way I had intended. In deciding to remake myself, I managed to avoid the fact that I would also, by definition, have to erase what self there was to begin with. I began to wonder, many years later, if total erasure had been my intent all along.

perhaps our purpose is, for the time being, to be human, to live on this earth and in this human community, to receive something from it, and to give something back.

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.

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

I wanted to turn heads not with lecherous leers of bemusement but with awe. I wanted to become untouchable, cruel, glittery, sleek and haughty as a cat.

I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.

The spiritual realm is not the ethereal beyond our lived experience. It is our experience, lived fully and well.

It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of deadly contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength. A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself.

What a child knows about transformation is very little. What an adult knows, I think, is even less. Because a child at least remembers that transformation is possible.

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.

Every morning I watched the sun rise and read a highly religious little meditation book and tried having a conversation with God. I waited for that sense of the presence of a Higher Power that I'd heard of. I chastised myself for not being open to real spiritual experience. It was one of the loneliest things I've ever done.

These contradictions begin to split a person in two. Body and mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an eating disorder may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion that an eating disorder may fester and thrive. An eating disorder is

I cannot help but think that, had I lived in a culture where "thinness" was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have sought out another means of attaining that grace

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

But at that moment—the moment of realization that life as I'd been living it would have to end—I felt devastation unlike any I'd ever known. The barrenness was indescribable. The emptiness that opened up in me seemed to stretch on forever; I could see no end to it, could find no source of comfort in it, could not imagine any way out.

When we believe ourselves to be alone, we have no responsibility to this world and are answerable to no one.

Step One is, paradoxically, both a crushing end and a beginning.

Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.

Am I ultimately alone? How many of us have asked that question—drunk or sober—when we've wondered if there was a God or when we've decided that there was none? And the universe reels around us, more vast than we could begin to comprehend and more apparently empty. But it's only when we overlook the fairly obvious fact that we are human beings on a planet packed with human beings that we can entertain the fairly self-indulgent idea that we are, in fact, alone.

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

If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I