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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

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Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Feelings
Ceased
Remember
Odd
Things
Emptiness
Would
Asked
Fine
Feeling
Recite
Point
Numbness
Words
Detachment

More quotes by Marya Hornbacher

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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 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.
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Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
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People take the feeling of full for granted.
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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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There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.
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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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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
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The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.
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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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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.
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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 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.
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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.
Marya Hornbacher
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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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I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
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.
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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.
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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
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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