Quotes from Marya Hornbacher

I can't say no, I can't slow down, I have to keep going or they'll find out I'm a little kid in grownup's clothes, and a fraud.

It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo.7 To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control.

I look out into the dark, which is made of velvet so soft and heavy you could gather it up in your hands if you weren't locked in.

I was gone too long. He let me go. All that remains is this overwhelming, nearly tactile cloud of resentment. Too much was required of him, and he has nothing left.

Sitting out there on the porch, I laughed. How funny—to think of us turning our clocks this way and that, importantly telling the sun when to rise and when to set, when we would prefer it to be light and when dark.

I relish my life. It is a life of which I am fiercely protective. I have wrested it back from madness, and madness cannot take it from me again. I will not throw it away. So what if it isn't a normal life? It's the one I have.

crazymeds.org—a private website run by someone with a mental illness, this site is incredibly helpful. It provides ongoing reviews of a large number of meds, which are written by people who actually take them.

They are solid, real. I am an object, useful but hollow. The absence of thought fills me up.

The lesson of daily spiritual practice is not a complicated one and requires no special equipment; we are simply learning to love. That, at the end of the day, is where a spiritual practice takes us: out into the world, living in and loving this world of the spirit, here and now.

We deserve more. Vastly more. Sufficiency, plenty, abundance. Not the denial of body that is no more than a metaphor for our denial of self.

the elements of myself that not so much want to die, but are afraid to live.

Steps Six and Seven are often brushed off, especially by the nonbeliever, because they seem to assume a direct relationship with a personal God. But they really are essential, and reconceptualizing them in a way that allows us to reach their spiritual core—the development of a clear moral self—is crucially important to those of us working the Steps in sobriety.

My most salient memories

My mother insulted me, I insulted her, Jeanne, the stepgrandmother, insulted everything in a skirt, and my grandfather just kept right on drinking. We picked at our food, competing for who could eat the least. When

You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.

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.

There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.

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.

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.

I do not remember very many things from the inside out. I do not remember what it felt like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.

I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.

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.

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?