Anorexia is not an illness of the body; it is an illness of the mind.
– Lynn Crilly, Hope with Eating Disorders
I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don’t want to die. I want to eat like a normal person eats, but I need to see my bones or I will hate myself even more and I might cut my heart out or take every pill that was ever made.
– Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it’s still going to be you underneath.
– Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been [me]. It wasn’t. It’s not.
– Harriet Brown, Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia
Soon I’ll be thinner than all of you, she swore to herself. And then I’ll be the winner. The thinner is the winner.
– Steven Levenkron, The Best Little Girl in the World
The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.
– Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss
Anorexia cannot be cured by treating the physical symptoms alone; it is the mind which must be treated.
– Lynn Crilly, Hope with Eating Disorders
My reflection followed me mercilessly in mirrors, car doors, shop windows. I lived in a world of circus mirrors, the grotesque distortion of my body looking back at me everywhere.
– Bethany Pierce, Feeling For Bones
They said I had to get fatter. I told them my goal was 080.00 and if they wanted my respect, they’d better stop lying to me.
When my brain started working again, I checked their math. Someone had made a mistake because they didn’t figure in the snakes in my head and the thick shadows hiding inside the cage of my ribs.
– Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
Anorexia is, without doubt, a serious eating disorder, but there is a hell of a lot of mainstream disordered eating going on out there.
– Emma Woolf, The Ministry of Thin
Anorexia taught me to love life and to realise that starving yourself to death is a bloody waste of time. It’s awful, and it hurts so many people around you. It’s a terribly selfish thing to do.
– Celia Imrie
If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don’t you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.
– Bethany Pierce, Feeling For Bones
Anorexics are the best liars in the world. You do anything to keep control. You place people into separate categories, those you trust, those you don’t, those you can confide in and those whom you lie to. But of course the reality is that underneath it all, you are lying to yourself all the time.
– Peter Barham, The Invisible Girl
She began to be reassured by these pains, tangible symbols of her success in becoming thinner than anyone else. Her only identity was being “the skinniest.” She had to feel it.
– Steven Levenkron, Kessa
Most dancers have no awareness of how they look; half of them think they’re fat. There is anorexia in the ballet world; there are those things.
– Benjamin Millepied
I always felt that anorexia was the form of breakdown most readily available to adolescent girls.
– Kate Beckinsale
A lot of the girls were awful, very catty. It was a competitive environment that I didn’t like. You have no idea of the anorexia I saw around me.
– Kate Winslet
For many years, I struggled with how I felt about myself. I hid and harbored very self-destructive eating issues, namely anorexia, which at its worst caused me to lose half of my hair and brought my weight down dramatically.
– Renee Olstead
Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body – waiflike, angular – that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away all the ancillary signs of sexuality, strips away breasts and hips and butt and leaves in their place a garish caricature, a cruel cartoon of flesh and bone.
-Caroline Knapp
Anorexia is an awful thing, but you get yourself into it, and only you can get yourself out of it.
– Celia Imrie
In New York, if you weigh under 200 pounds and decline so much as a cookie at a co-worker’s party, women will flock to your side, assuring you of your appealing physique. This is how skittish we are about the dangers of anorexia and the pressures of body image.
– Sloane Crosley
Anorexia was there for me before I got into modeling, but because of the arena and the demands, the disease really got out of control for me. It’s like being an alcoholic and going and being a bartender.
– Carre Otis
I was anorexic in the ’60s and ’70s, although it wasn’t called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn’t high on my agenda. But it is now.
– Marianne Faithfull
I think my anorexia was to do with being a teenager, not being in films.
– Christina Ricci