"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. 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 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)

"There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger."
— 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)

"And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back."
— 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)

"I began to measure things in absence instead of presence."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing."
— Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"Bear in mind, people with eating dissorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school,athletics,artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school,drop out,quit jobs,leave lovers,move,lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather,we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule,most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength."
— 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)

"But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for worse, made by default."
— 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)

"I was used to sleeping with people because I endlessly found myself in identical situations where it was easier to just fuck them than to say no."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

""For a long time I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame."
"
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"Hospitalizations in general are blurry. The days are the same, precisely the same. Nothing changes. Life melts down to a simple progression of meals. They become a way of life fairly quickly. . . You may welcome this transition. It may seem inevitable to you. You have been removed from the world. . . It is all right, in a way, because there is nothing so sure, so safe, as routine. "
— Marya Hornbacher (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 one in another, where everything is upside down and backwards and sad.""
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

""But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

"I don't much care where –"

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?
— The Mad Hatter"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then. "
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"...if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

""it's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," says the White Queen to Alice."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"“I've had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone: “so I can't take more.” “You mean you can't take less,” said the Hatter: “it's very easy to take more than nothing.”"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"If i had a world of my own,everything would be nonsence.Nothing would be what it is becuase everything would be what it isnt. "
— Alice in Wonderland

"The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday-but never jam today

It must come sometime to jam today, Alice objected

No it can't said the Queen It's jame every other day. Today isn't any other day, you know"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass)

"She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"'And how many hours a day did you do lessons?' said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
'Ten hours the first day,' said the Mock Turtle: 'nine the next, and so on.'
'What a curious plan!' exclaimed Alice.
'That's the reason they're called lessons,' the Gryphon remarked: 'because they lessen from day to day.'"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass)

"If you drink too much from a bottle marked "poison," it's almost certain to disagree with you sooner or later. "
— Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"''the time has come'' the walrus said, ''to speak of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.''"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."
— J.D. Salinger

"Mothers are all slightly insane."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to."
— J.D. Salinger

"I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.
"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"...when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"'This is a people shooting hat,' I said. 'I shoot people in this hat.'"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. "
— Augusten Burroughs (Magical Thinking: True Stories)

"Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face."
— Augusten Burroughs

"My mother began to go crazy. Not in a 'Let's paint the kitchen red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwhich, I am God' sort of way."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors: A Memoir)

"Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I'm an imposter. The fact is, I am not like other people."
— Augusten Burroughs (Dry: A Memoir)

"I hate feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings?"
— Augusten Burroughs

"We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors)

"I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks-accidentally-and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors: A Memoir)

"I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she's fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can't be explained. She's always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors: A Memoir)