Quote

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

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Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Long
Emotional
Lists
Pack
Resentments
Memories
Wounds
Packs
Certainties
Turn
Certainty
Rats
Dusty
Greater
Absolutes
Resentment
Glorified
Wrong
Absolute
Bags
Dated
Turns
Carry
List
Collected
Around
Later
Significance
Lesser
Humans
Childhood
Define
Countless

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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!
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I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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People take the feeling of full for granted.
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In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.
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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.
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The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
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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?
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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.
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I'm a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.
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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.
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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.
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My parents say that even as a very, very little kid, the way that I acted was dramatically different from other little kids.
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...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.
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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.
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Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
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I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
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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.
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