Marya Hornbacher Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

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
And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California at least once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.

Marya Hornbacher
I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?

Marya Hornbacher
And so I am feeling numb. It's a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.

Marya Hornbacher
All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.

Marya Hornbacher
You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.

Marya Hornbacher
Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.

Marya Hornbacher
For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.

Marya Hornbacher
The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.

Marya Hornbacher
In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.

Marya Hornbacher
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
I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

Marya Hornbacher
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
We were at another funeral party. I wasn't sure who had died this time, but it was a suicide, and upsetting because it was completely out of season. No on killed themselves in summertime. It was rude.

Marya Hornbacher
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
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
I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my own corporeality, my physical imposition on space.

Marya Hornbacher
I developed a deep, abiding fear of jeans, which I still have. I hold my breath and shut my eyes when I pull on a pair in the dressing room, afraid they will now, as then, get stuck at my hips and there I will stand, absurd, staring at the excess of hips that should, if I were a good person, be „slim.

Marya Hornbacher
Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.

Marya Hornbacher
I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

Marya Hornbacher
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
My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.

Marya Hornbacher
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
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.

Marya Hornbacher
The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.

Marya Hornbacher
And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.

Marya Hornbacher
Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.

Marya Hornbacher
There was a time when I was unable to get out of bed because my body, its muscles eating themselves away, refused to sit up. There was a time when the lies rolled off my tongue with ease, when it was far more important to me to self-destruct than to admit I had a problem, let alone allow anyone to help.

Marya Hornbacher
Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be alright.

Marya Hornbacher
Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn't exist at all.

Marya Hornbacher