Quotes from Marya Hornbacher

The side of me that feared fire and longed for ice, that cringed at noise and hungered for silence, that shied from touch and desired to numb itself into nothing.

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.

comprehending little and caring less.

Call it the feeling of love that connects us. Call it the creative force that drives us to transform. Call it our energy. Call it our capacity to give. Call it grace, or even divinity, something that allows for those things to exist within us as individuals and between us each time we connect.

There is no right," she says. "There's the best you can do. And that's fine. That's normal.

Whether one believes that transformation is effected by the will of an outer force, or the willingness of an inner self, does not change the reality of transformation as a phenomenon of spiritual experience. All we need to know is that it does occur. We have proof of that; we have our living, breathing, ever-expanding spiritual selves.

I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company

It is easy to write off childlike faith in the universe and childlike wonder at the world as simply a lack of knowledge about "how life really is." Well, how is life, really? Do we know—we who have been denying life, life's beauty and its true challenges, for such a long time? Or did we know better as children, when the whole world seemed to be filled with meaning and possibility, both good and bad?

We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?

We are, by our very human nature, limited in what we can know or do or control or change.

for the purposes of my own spirituality, it is far more useful to recognize the limitations of my knowledge; to humble myself, not before a deity, but simply to be humble; to surrender, again, not to a God but simply to surrender; and to accept. Not accept certain facts; but simply to train myself in the practice of acceptance.

The spiritual self is the deepest, most integrated aspect of who we are.

The sense that we are only the sum of our parts—whatever we achieve, however we appear, whatever we own, however we try to prove ourselves—is not a good sense. It's an existential crisis: Do I even exist? If you take away the masks I wear, is there only blank space underneath?

You don't just get it, the way you just get a cold; you take it into your head, consider it as an idea first, play with the behaviors awhile, see if they take root.

This side of passion was my first perversion. The tendency toward excess veered out of control into bulimia, that state of fear and desire, that violent crashing back and forth between hunger and the abortion of hunger, between taking in and throwing back what is most needed and instinctively desired: food. The bread of life.

The reward is entrance to the "world of the Spirit," which is to say, entrance to this world, a place at this table, in this human life. I am not much concerned about the existence of a hereafter, a "next" life—this life is what I have, this is where I live, and I believe that my spiritual growth depends upon the work I do here and now. That work amounts to seeing this world clearly, moving through it gently, and learning to love it well.

The physical food transubstantiates in our minds into something more ethereal, of human and emotional nurturance, a sense that our hungers are being sated. Even if you are just stuffing handfuls of fries into your mouth on a binge, you still feel that some emptiness, if briefly, is being filled.

we have few words for spiritual beyond those that refer back to a God. But not believing in a God is not opposed to a belief in an aspect of the self that can be called spiritual. The latter is experienced, and defined, very personally, and is different for each individual.

when a woman is thin in this culture, she proves her worth, in a way that no great accomplishment, no stellar career, nothing at all can match.

He is the most wonderful person alive. I am suddenly struck by the fact that he is unlike anyone else in the world. How many people could love me like this? How many people would visit every day at six o'clock, without fail? And bring me dinner, and a grocery bag of fruit? Who could? Who would? Why would they?

My mother would mock me. God is merely a weakness for people who need to believe.

For all its God language, the Twelve Step program isn't actually an attempt at religious conversion. Really, it just tries to bring us to a place of new spiritual understanding that allows us to live differently in this world.

The hands of his sadness close around my throat and I can't breathe. I have run out of the enormous love he needs to be all right.

I have a word. Now it will be better. Now it has a name, and if it has a name, it's a real thing, not merely my imagination gone wild. If it has a name, if it isn't merely an utter failure on my part, if it's a disease, bipolar disorder, then it has an answer. Then it has a cure.