Top 100 Marya Hornbacher Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Marya Hornbacher

2. “In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.”

— Marya Hornbacher

3. “I either want to be completely recovered or completely emaciated. It’s the in between that I can’t stand, the limbo of failure where you know that you haven’t done your best at one or the other: dying or living.”

— Marya Hornbacher

4. “There is, in the end, the letting go.”

— Marya Hornbacher

5. “And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”

— Marya Hornbacher

6. “You will not stop. The pain is necessary, especially the pain of hunger. It reassures you that you are strong, can withstand anything, that you are not a slave to your body, you don’t have to give in to its whining.”

— Marya Hornbacher

Featured in: Strong Quotes

7. “You will miss her sometimes. Bear in mind she’s trying to kill you. Bear in mind you have a life to live.”

— Marya Hornbacher

8. “Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.”

— Marya Hornbacher

9. “Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.”

— Marya Hornbacher

10. “The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying.”

— Marya Hornbacher

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

— Marya Hornbacher

12. “We think of bulimia and anorexia as either a bizarre psychosis, or as a quirky little habit, a phase, or as a thing that women just do. We forget that it is a violent act, that it bespeaks a profound level of anger toward and fear of the self.”

— Marya Hornbacher

13. “I’m a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.”

— Marya Hornbacher

14. “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?”

— Marya Hornbacher

15. “Madness is not what it seems. Time stops. All my life I’ve been obsessed with time, its motion and velocity, the way it works you over, the way it rushes you onward, a pebble turning in a brook. I’ve always been obsessed with where I’d go, and what I’d do, and how I would live. I’ve always harbored a desperate hope that I would make something of myself. Not then. Time stopped seeming so much like the thing that would transform me into something worthwhile and began to be inseparable from death. I spent my time merely waiting.”

— Marya Hornbacher

16. “But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for worse, made by default.”

— Marya Hornbacher

17. “For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I’m unable to write.”

— Marya Hornbacher

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

18. “I am often drawn to what appear at first to be ‘dark’ or ‘difficult’ subjects, but which, upon further examination, are always and only reflections of the ways human beings attempt, however clumsily, badly, or well, to connect with others.”

— Marya Hornbacher

19. “We know we need, and so we acquire and eat and eat, past the point of bodily fullness, trying to sate a greater need. Ashamed of this, we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how to not-need.”

— Marya Hornbacher

20. “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 one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”

— Marya Hornbacher

21. “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

22. “I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can’t be that bad. It’s only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They’re just gross.”

— Marya Hornbacher

23. “I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.”

— Marya Hornbacher

24. “Anorexia and bulimia seem to be getting much more common in boys, men, and women of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds; they are also becoming more common in racial groups previously thought to be impervious to the problem.”

— Marya Hornbacher

25. “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

26. “This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don’t really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you.”

— Marya Hornbacher

27. “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

28. “That nothing – not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state – will make the past disappear.”

— Marya Hornbacher

29. “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

30. “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

31. “The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.”

— Marya Hornbacher

32. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

33. “I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like- the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you.”

— Marya Hornbacher

34. “He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it’s still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.”

— Marya Hornbacher

35. “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

36. “People take the feeling of full for granted.”

— Marya Hornbacher

37. “Because I’m not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb – one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I’m coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.”

— Marya Hornbacher

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

38. “I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.”

— Marya Hornbacher

39. “And then the horror sets in. All that time I wasn’t crazy; I was, in fact, crazy. It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression. I’m sick. It’s true. It isn’t going to go away. All my life, I’ve thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I’ve always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I’d be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone.”

— Marya Hornbacher

40. “I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it’s high maintenance.”

— Marya Hornbacher

41. “I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.”

— Marya Hornbacher

42. “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

43. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

44. “My parents say that even as a very, very little kid, the way that I acted was dramatically different from other little kids.”

— Marya Hornbacher

45. “When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.”

— Marya Hornbacher

46. “It does not hit you until later. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw. First it is numb. Then a shock of pain rips through the body. And then, every winter after, it aches.”

— Marya Hornbacher

47. “You can’t teach an ear, you can’t teach talent, but you can teach people who have those things not to just fly by the seat of their pants.”

— Marya Hornbacher

48. “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

49. “Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier.”

— Marya Hornbacher

50. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher