Quote

There is, in the end, the letting go.

Marya Hornbacher

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Ends
Letting
Chaos

More quotes by Marya Hornbacher

Image
We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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
Image
I have a type of bipolar that swings up and down all day long. There are significant mood swings within a day, within a week, within a month. I go through at least four major episodes a year. That's really the definition of bipolar rapid cycle. But I have ultra-rapid, so I have tiny little episodes all day long.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The problem is that you don't just choose recovery. You have to keep choosing recovery, over and over and over again. You have to make that choice 5-6 times each day. You have to make that choice even when you really don't want to. It's not a single choice, and it's not easy.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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
Image
My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!
Marya Hornbacher
Image
It's really interesting to me how all of us can experience the exact same event, and yet come away with wildly disparate interpretations of what happened. We each have totally different ideas of what was said, what was intended, and what really took place.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
I'm a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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
Image
When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?
Marya Hornbacher
Image
...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
Starvation is incredibly frightening when it finally sets in with a vengeance. And when it does,you are surprised. You hadn't meant this. You say: Wait, not this. And then it sucks you under and you drown.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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