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After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.

Marya Hornbacher

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Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Difficult
Speak
Lifetime
Silence

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
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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.
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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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...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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
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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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Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
Marya Hornbacher
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In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.
Marya Hornbacher
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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
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When I returned, everything was different. Everything was calm, and I felt very clean. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be. I had a secret. It was a guilty secret, certainly. But it was MY secret. I had something to hold on to. It was company. It kept me calm. It filled me up and emptied me out.
Marya Hornbacher
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I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You're dying.
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