Top 100 Marya Hornbacher Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I had a love affair with books, with characters and their words. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.”

— Marya Hornbacher

52. “There are women in my closet, hanging on the hangers. a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lipsticks.”

— Marya Hornbacher

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

— Marya Hornbacher

54. “I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”

— Marya Hornbacher

55. “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

56. “Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.”

— Marya Hornbacher

57. “I relish my life. It’s the one I have. It’s difficult, beautiful, painful, full of laughter, passing strange. Whatever else it is, whatever it brings – it’s mine.”

— Marya Hornbacher

58. “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

59. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

60. “Having a normal person around me made it poingnantly clear to me that I was out of control.”

— Marya Hornbacher

61. “So many means of self-destruction, so little time.”

— Marya Hornbacher

62. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

63. “The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive.”

— Marya Hornbacher

64. “Children take in more information than we’d like to believe.”

— Marya Hornbacher

65. “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

66. “You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.”

— Marya Hornbacher

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

— Marya Hornbacher

68. “When we doubt, we learn to accept that we may not ever know. When we question, we learn to accept that there may be no answer. When we shout our doubt out into the universe, we learn to accept that we may be met with a silence we do not know how to read.”

— Marya Hornbacher

69. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

70. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

71. “When you believe that you are not worthwhile in and of yourself, in the back of your mind you also begin to believe that life is not worthwhile in and of itself. It is only worthwhile insofar as it relates to your crusade. It is a kamikaze mission.”

— Marya Hornbacher

72. “After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.”

— Marya Hornbacher

73. “The last place I want to be is the hospital, but I’m not stupid. I know when it’s time to go in. I am so terrified of myself and of the vast, frightening world, that the psych ward, with its safe locked doors, sounds like a relief.”

— Marya Hornbacher

74. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

75. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

76. “I know for a fact that sickness is easier, but health is more interesting.”

— Marya Hornbacher

77. “We’re like little kids. We are little kids, but don’t tell us that – we’re having a fantastic time. We have our little house, and live our little life. We are the perfect young husband and wife. We have nonstop dinner parties – the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine. I sometimes feel as if I’ve raced off a cliff and am spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine. Crazy people don’t have dinner parties, do they? No.”

— Marya Hornbacher

78. “The term “starvation diet” refers to 900 calories a day. I was on one-third of a starvation diet. What do you call that? One word that comes to my mind: “suicide.”

— Marya Hornbacher

79. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

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

— Marya Hornbacher

81. “There is no right,” she says. “There’s the best you can do. And that’s fine. That’s normal.”

— Marya Hornbacher

82. “Here’s the hell of it: madness doesn’t announce itself. There isn’t time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay; it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge.”

— Marya Hornbacher

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

— Marya Hornbacher

84. “Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism pleasurable to many, but we don’t like to think about that. We don’t like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on, be both a top and a bottom, and experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow.”

— Marya Hornbacher

85. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

86. “Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times.”

— Marya Hornbacher

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

— Marya Hornbacher

88. “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?”

— Marya Hornbacher

89. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

90. “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 else.”

— Marya Hornbacher

91. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

92. “Waiting through doubt teaches us enormous spiritual strength. It gives us the strength to go on – through struggle, through joy, through recovery, through our daily lives – even though we do not know how to name or describe a power or powers greater than ourselves. And the paradox is this: to accept this not-knowing – to accept doubt, a lack of certainty – is to accept the very nature of life as it is. In accepting doubt, unanswered questions, and unknowing, we accept life on life’s terms.”

— Marya Hornbacher

93. “All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.”

— Marya Hornbacher

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

— Marya Hornbacher

95. “For a long time I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame.”

— Marya Hornbacher

96. “There is always reason to care. There is always reason to give. It is what we are here to do.”

— Marya Hornbacher

97. “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

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

— Marya Hornbacher

99. “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.”

— Marya Hornbacher

100. “That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.”

— Marya Hornbacher