The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive.
I’m a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.
I know for a fact that sickness is easier, but health is more interesting.
After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.
I am often drawn to what appear at first to be ‘dark’ or ‘difficult’ subjects, but which, upon further examination, are always and only reflections of the ways human beings attempt, however clumsily, badly, or well, to connect with others.
Children take in more information than we’d like to believe.
People take the feeling of full for granted.
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.
I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I’m not feeling. Or, more to the point: I’m not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?
I had a love affair with books, with characters and their words. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.
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.
That nothing – not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state – will make the past disappear.
I either want to be completely recovered or completely emaciated. It’s the in between that I can’t stand, the limbo of failure where you know that you haven’t done your best at one or the other: dying or living.
So many means of self-destruction, so little time.
I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.
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.
Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.
The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
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 back down the hall.