"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when their right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust noone but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring."
— Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words)

"A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left."
— Marilyn Monroe

"When it comes down to it, I let them think what they want. If they care enough to bother with what I do, then I'm already better than them."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Who said nights were for sleep?"
— Marilyn Monroe

"I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't."
— Marilyn Monroe

"I want to grow old without facelifts. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Well behaved women rarely make history."
— Marilyn Monroe

"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)

"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)

"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 wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest."
— Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"There is, in the end, the letting go."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)