Quote

Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.

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
Started
Disappeared
Making
Closet
Away
Closets
Mother
Fairy
Needs
Tales
World
Driving
Exist
Wouldn
Retreated

More quotes by 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
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
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
Image
Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
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
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
I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.
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
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
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
There is, in the end, the letting go.
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
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
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
...Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.
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
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
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