Quote

I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.

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
Illness
Simply
High
Many
Would
Think
Chronic
Thinking
Maintenance
People
Prefer

More quotes by Marya Hornbacher

Image
Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
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
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
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
Image
After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.
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
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
You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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
Image
I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.
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
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
I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.
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
Starvation is incredibly frightening when it finally sets in with a vengeance. And when it does,you are surprised. You hadn't meant this. You say: Wait, not this. And then it sucks you under and you drown.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
People take the feeling of full for granted.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
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
Image
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.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.
Marya Hornbacher