Quotes By Letter: H
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“I didn't particularly want to live much longer than [twenty]. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed like too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be required to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precocious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do -- it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone -- and be done with it. Go to sleep. Go to a heaven where there was nothing but bathtubs and books.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“I felt like I was going out of my mind. My head was never quiet. Quiet is an in-between point, implying a balance between noise and silence, between the strange blackouts I began to have -- pure silence, not sleeplike but deathlike -- and the hellish shrieking jumble of my own thoughts and the voices of the world.
And the sharp hiss of one voice that started out softly, as though below layers of moss, or flesh, and gradually became so loud it drowned out everything else: Thinner, it said. You've got to get thinner.
But you know, even then, that word was wrong. It is more than Thinness, per se, that you crave. It is the implication of Thin. The tacit threat of Thin. The Houdini-esque-ness of Thin, walking on hot coals without a flinch, sleeping on a bed of nails. You wish to carry Thinness on your arm, with her cool smile. You wish for that invisible, vibrating wire that hums between two lovers, implying a private touch. You wish for such a wire, humming between you and Thinness, at a party, on the street, humming softly between you and death.”
-Wasted, 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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“I'd read somewhere that if you made yourself a snow cave you could keep warm, the snow itself would keep out the cold of the snow, and I was so incredibly tired, willing my legs to keep walking. We were having a family outing and I didn't want to ruin it but I was so fucking cold. 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. It isn't an outside sort of cold; it's a cold that gets into your bones and into your blood and it feels like your heart itself is beating out the cold in hard bursts through your entire body, and you suddenly remember that you have a body because you can't ignore it anymore. You feel like an ice cube.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“In truth, you like the pain...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...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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained--and in the end, of course you find it's doing quite the opposite.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“It was not the first time I'd fallen. It wasn't even the first time I'd faded, slipped, and fallen, not the first time I felt my vision blur and dim. But before there had always been a few things to warn me: the knees buckle, the center of gravity dissolves and the arms feels like they've begun to float, the ears ring, the eyelids flutter. It's just like the movies. I could always see myself falling, I'd always known. This time it just went black.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“Malnutrition precipitates mania. So does speed. Both were at play here, in large doses. But so was masochism - the subjection of the self and/or body to pain and fear, ultimately resulting in a transitory sense of mastery over pain and fear. Every morning, I ran five miles, up and down this hall, touching the door at each end, the mark of an obsession. I had to touch the door or else it didn't count. You make up these rules, and if you break the rules, God help you, you have to run an extra mile to make up for it. When I was done, I'd go downstairs to the workout room and weigh myself.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless... I'm not going to have a happy ending.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You're so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I knew you'd leave.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“Run into the bathroom, turn on the fans, the shower, the tap in the sink, click up the toilet seat, swig both sodas, vomit. And vomit some more until your knees are too weak. When you stand up, they'll buckle, and you'll swing to the edge of the sink, holding on for dear life. Dear life my ass. By November, you wish you were dead. You want nothing more. Every day, every fucking day, you run up the steps of the house, breathing hard, swing open the cupboards, thinking: You pitiful little bitch. Fucking cow. Greedy pig. All day, your stomach pinches and spits up its bile. You sway when you walk. You begin to get cold again.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“So many means of self-destruction, so little time.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“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 all right.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“That paradox would begin to run my life: to know that what you are doing is hurting you, maybe killing you, and to be afraid of that fact--but to cling to the idea that this will save you, it will, in the end, make things okay.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself, and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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“While I waited I counted my bones. They were all still there. Then I thought, my God. I straightened up, held the cold brick wall while the dizziness came in waves and washed away. I walked very slowly inside, placing my feet carefully on the floor. I went to the desk and signed myself in.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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