“How silly people were to eat. They thought they needed food for energy, but they didn't. Energy came from will, from self-control.”
― Steven Levenkron, The Best Little Girl in the World
“If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.”
― Bethany Pierce, Feeling For Bones
“The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.”
― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss
Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn’t sick; I was strong.
Laurie Halse Anderson
We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food.
Kate Wicker
We are the daughters of the feminists who said, “You can be anything,” and we heard, “You have to be everything.
Courtney Martin
The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
Marya Hornbacher
“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“• Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving—you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy—and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves are intense and focused. Your sense of power is very, very intense. You are not aware, however, that you are quickly becoming addicted.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Your environment? It couldn't careless. You are also doing it for yourself. It is a short-cut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed. And it is so very seductive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming, so entertaining. At first.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“Something had been confirmed: I was worth giving a shit about; I was getting to be a successful sick person. Sick is when they say something. Of course, I had been sick for five years. But now, now maybe I was really sick. Maybe I was getting good at this, good enough to scare people. Maybe I would almost die, and balance just there, at the edge of the cliff, wavering while they gasped and clutched one another's arms, and win acclaim for my death-defying stunts. ”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“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.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. You may change your behaviour, change your beliefs about yourself and your body, give up that particular way of coping in the world. You may learn, as I have, that you would rather be a human than a human's thin shell. You may get well. But you never forget.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
That paradox would begin to run my life: to know that what you are doing is hurting you, maybe killing you, and to be afraid of that fact--but to cling to the idea that this will save you, it will, in the end, make things okay.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“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, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“We feign disinterest and laugh, and creep into the kitchen some nights, a triangle of light spilled on the floor form the fridge, shovelling cold casseroles, ice cream, jelly, cheese, into our mouths, swallowing without chewing as we listen to the steady, echoing tisk-tisk-tisk of the clock. I have done this. Millions of people have done this. There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There is a hunger for something, and we never know quite what it is, only that it is a hunger, so we eat.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Bodies are forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little.
