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...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

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Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Someone
Psychotic
Right
Hats
Going
Speaks
Soft
Tone
Unperturbed
Says
Crayons
Asks
Crayon
Speak
Tones

More quotes by Marya Hornbacher

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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
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Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
Marya Hornbacher
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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
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I'm a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.
Marya Hornbacher
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There is, in the end, the letting go.
Marya Hornbacher
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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
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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
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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.
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.
Marya Hornbacher
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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
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I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.
Marya Hornbacher
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You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.
Marya Hornbacher
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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
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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
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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
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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
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And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
Marya Hornbacher
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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
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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
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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