Cheyenne > Cheyenne'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

“We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

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

“I didn't realize there was a ranking." I said. "Sadie frowned. "What do you mean?" "A ranking," I said. "You know, what's crazier than what." "Oh, sure there is," Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. "First you have your generic depressives. They're a dime a dozen and usually pretty boring. Then you've got the bulimics and the anorexics. They're slightly more interesting, although usually they're just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you've got the junkies. They're completely tragic, because chances are they're just going to go right back on the stuff when they're out of here." "So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain," I said. Sadie shook her head. "Uh-uh," she said. "Suicides are." I looked at her. "Why?" "Anyone can be crazy," she answered. "That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?”
― Michael Thomas Ford

“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

“I do not remember very many things from the inside out. I do not remember what it felt like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“There is, in the end, the letting go.”
― 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

“By November, you wish you were dead. You want nothing more. Every day, every fucking day, you run up the steps of the house, breathing hard, swing open the cupboards, thinking: You pitiful little bitch. Fucking cow. Greedy pig. All day, your stomach pinches and spits up its bile. You sway when you walk. You begin to get cold again.”
― 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

“And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”
― 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 of the time, and you can´t remember what it was like before.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like – the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you. It isn´t an outside sort of cold; it´s a cold that gets into your bones and into your blood and it feels like your heart itself is beating out the cold in hard bursts through your entire body, and you suddenly remember that you have a body because you can´t ignore it anymore. You feel like an ice cube. You feel like you´re naked and have fallen through thin ice on a lake and are drowning in the ice water underneath. You can´t breathe.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Depression is about anger, it is about anxiety, it is about character and heredity. But it is also about something that is in its way quite unique. It is the illness of identity, it is the illness of those who do not know where they fit, who lose faith in the myths they have so painstakenly created for themselves. [...] It is a plague - especially if you add in its various forms of expression, like alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia, drug addiction, compulsive behaviour of one kind or another. They're all the same things: attempts to avoid disappearance, or nothingness, or chaos.”
― Tim Lott, Scent of Dried Roses

“I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“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

“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.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Remember, anoretics do eat. We have systems of eating that develop almost unconsciously. By the time we realize we´ve been running our lives with an iron system of numbers and rules, the system has begun to rule us. They are systems of Safe Foods, foods not imbued, or less imbued, with monsters and devils and dangers. These are usually “pure” foods, less likely to taint the soul with such sins as fat, or sugar, or an excess of calories. Consider the advertisements for food, the religious lexicon of eating: “sinfully rich,” intones the silky voice announcer, “indulge yourself,” she says, “guilt-free.” Not complex foods that would send the mind spinning in a tornado of possible pitfalls contained in a given food – a possible miscalculation of calories, a loss of certainty about your control over chaos, your control over self. The horrible possibility that you are taking more than you deserve.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“A bulimic person's shame may lead her to try to hide not only her eating-disorder behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings. She may wish that her needs and desires did not exist and may try to act as if she does not need or want anything or anyone. When that attempt inevitably fails, she may wish that others could magically read her mind and respond to her needs and wants without her having to ask for anything. To avoid the shame of expressing her needs and desires, she turns to food, rather than relationships, for comfort".”
― Sheila M. Reindl, Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia

“Your lowest moment and life can be your best if you survive it and learn from it”
― Brian Cuban, Shattered Image: My Triumph Over Body Dysmorphic Disorder

“I finally understood that by being on a perpetual diet, I had practiced a "disordered" form of eating my whole life. I restricted when I was hungry and in need of nutrition and binged when I was so grotesquely full I couldn't be comfortable in any position by lying down. Diets that tell people what to eat or when to eat are the practices inbetween. And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating.”
― Portia de Rossi, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain

“We both knew what it was to hurt our bodies. It's a strange reason to bond with someone, but I think we both needed to feel understood, and, even though we couldn't love ourselves, we could love each other.”
― Melissa C. Water, Lady Injury

“I promise no food will ever hurt you as much as a negative mind.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“yet still I crave the sight of my own hypnotic gaze reflecting out at me from the shared mirror of anorexia and bulimia, number to life and reality, existing only in my self-made tortured state”
― Carol Lee, To Die For

“That was when I realized I had no control over my actions anymore. All I knew was that though no one knew what hell felt like, my life had become a version of fire and brimstone. My restrictive anorexia was completely and inexorably interfering with my ability to live like a normal human being.”
― Insha Juneja, Imperfect Mortals : A Collection of Short Stories

“Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of strange little girls screaming through their fingers. My patient sisters, always waiting for me. I scroll through our confessions and rants and prayers, desperation eating us one slow bloody bite at a time.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls