“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.”
― Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
― Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“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.”
― Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
― Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
“Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”
― Notebooks 1935-1942
― Notebooks 1935-1942
Alvarez’s 2025 Year in Books
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