Ema > Ema's Quotes

“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.”
― George Carlin

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“I don't like ass kissers, flag wavers or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn people: "Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no "I" in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an "I" in independence, individuality and integrity.'" Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name. If they say, "We're the So-and-Sos," take a walk. And if, somehow, you must join, if it's unavoidable, such as a union or a trade association, go ahead and join. But don't participate; it will be your death. And if they tell you you're not a team player, congratulate them on being observant.”
― George Carlin

“There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“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, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don’t really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be "about" any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could "make" you do such a thing— who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't careless. You are also doing it for yourself. It is a shortcut 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

“The night I shaved it off altogether, a Staff named Mark, whose take-no-prisoners approach I respected and feared, pulled me aside, looked me hard in the face, and said, Marya, your hair. I said, Yeah, so? crossing my arms in front of me. He said, It’s harsh. I said, Yeah, well. He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it’s still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked down the hall. I didn’t want it to be me underneath. I wanted to kill the me underneath. The fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behaviour for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me. ”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

“Other times, I look at my scars and see something else: a girl who was trying to cope with something horrible that she should never have had to live through at all. My scars show pain and suffering, but they also show my will to survive. They're part of my history that'll always be there.”
― Cheryl Rainfield, Scars

“Then I place the blade next to the skine on my palm.
A tingle arced across my scalp. The flood tipped up at me and my body spiraled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next. What happened next was thet a perfect, straight line of blood bloomed from under the blade.The line grow into a long, Fat bubbel, A lush crimson bubbel that got bigger and bigger. I watch from above, waiting to see how big it would get before it burst. when it did, I felt awesome. Satisfied, finally. Then exhausted.”
― Patricia McCormick, Cut

“No one ever found out what was happening inside me. How the pain was eating me away. No one ever came to my rescue, or stood up for me.”
― Julie Anne Peters, By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

“Stop trying to save me. You couldn't then; you can't now.”
― Julie Anne Peters, By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

“The sad truth is, they should never trust me.”
― Julie Anne Peters, By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

“I want to tell them, "Chip, Kim, there is no way to suicide-proof a person.”
― Julie Anne Peters, By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

“She's still doing it, pushing me into situations I can't handle, making me cope. She knows I can't cope.”
― Julie Anne Peters, By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

“How does he do it? Live. With the fear of death every day. I don't fear death as much as I fear the thought of living.”
― Julie Anne Peters, By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

“There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. I have an eating disorder.”
― Jena Morrow, Hollow: An Unpolished Tale

“Recovery feels like shit. It didn't feel like I was doing something good; it felt like I was giving up. It feels like having to learn how to walk all over again.”
― Portia de Rossi, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain