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Alt som ikke blir til noe, gjør vondt. Alt som ikke blir til noe. Det forsvinner ikke.

Det særegne ved min inspirasjon, som gjør at jeg som den lykkeligste og ulykkeligste nå klokken to om natten går til sengs (denne vil kanskje, om jeg bare kan utstå tanken på den, kunne holde seg, for den er mer storslagen enn alle tidligere), er at jeg kan alt, ikke bare det som angår ett bestemt arbeid. Om jeg vilkårlig skriver ned en setning, for eksempel: "Han så ut av vinduet", så er den allerede fullkommen.

Jeg har ikke kraft til en eneste setning. Om det bare hadde dreid seg om ord, om det bare hadde vært nok å skrive ned et ord og man så kunne vende seg bort i trygge forvissning om å ha fylt ordet fullstendig med en selv.

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.

"I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."

Karl Marx? The Smiths? Hvorfor klarer vi ikke å ha et vanlig liv? Hvorfor har det blitt sånn som dette? Hvorfor klarer vi ikke å slippe bort fra oss selv? Jeg har kjent deg siden 1988. Du kjente meg fra jeg var en fjør. Det var vind omkring oss. Vi sprakk mot solen. Husker du det? Alt var vårt. Alt var nå. Blått lys, kjølig regn, ublid natt, rød tur: Vi er eldre.

Never believe an eating-disordered person who says she hates food. It’s a lie. Denied food, your body and brain will begin to obsess about it. It’s the survival instinct, a constant reminder to eat, one that you try harder and harder to ignore, though you never can. Instead of eating, you simply think about food all the time. You dream about it, you stare at it, but you do not eat it. When you get to the hospital, you have to eat, and as truly terrifying as it is, it is also welcome. Food is the sun and the moon and the stars, the center of gravity, the love of your life. Being forced to eat is the most welcome punishment there is.

“You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel alright. You forget what it means to feel alright 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, and 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 dissolve with a battery-acid mixture of caffeine and pills. They do not wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting with muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. They may or may not be awakened in the night by their own inexplicable sobs”

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.

He is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else remained, and we were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger… He’s always, always in my mind; not as a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

"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."

We accept the love we think we deserve.

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"

I told him that we might be facing fifty million monsters, but those monsters would be facing the gods.

He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say should be said.

They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.