Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Head
Lengths
Right
Understandable
Great
Coherent
World
Theories
Length
Keeps
Prove
Theory

More quotes by Marya Hornbacher

Image
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
Image
There is, in the end, the letting go.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
Image
My relationships with both my mother and father are good. We spent several difficult years hashing over the problems and the past, and worked out a fairly solid middle ground. I wouldn't say my relationship with either of them - they're no longer together - is exactly typical, but that would be difficult after all we went through.
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
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
Image
Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
People take the feeling of full for granted.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
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
After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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
Image
In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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