Emma Forrest
When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets' Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn't yet know the word 'foreshadowing.' Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by.
The problem with writing a book about bulimia is that whenever you go to the washroom, people think you're throwing up.
The truth is I have had, for whatever reason, several movie-star boyfriends.
New York is the first place I have ever felt safe.
I used to devour biographies of people like Natalie Wood and Marilyn.
I'm not rich, though everybody thinks I am.
There's so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.
Everyone asks about how I'll feel about the tattoos and scars in thirty years. I always say: "I'll like them." I've always loved damaged monuments, in architecture and in humans.Collection: Tattoo
I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.Collection: Light
I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.Collection: Girl
A lot of the time in my recurring dreams, before I was diagnosed, iconic people would either be good or evil figures. I remember dreaming really basic stuff like trying to navigate the London underground, but then Paul Newman would be the only one who would direct me to the right trains. And I'm trying to remember who would direct me to the wrong ones.Collection: Dream
Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn't, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.Collection: Get Well
But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.Collection: Pain
There is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
There is that doll dress-up quality of adorable teenage girl writer, and I never felt either as adorable as I was supposed to be, or as dark as the rumors, you know, "She must have slept with the editor," and I was like, "Oh my god, I'm still a virgin." It was very strange.Collection: Girl
I finally accept that not only do I not understand the death of my relationship, but I do not need to. These men were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom. The revelation is not that I lost them, but that I had them.Collection: Men
He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.Collection: Loss
I wish I had been less keen to inject my own opinions, but I was a teenager and your teenage self is generally an idiot compared to the adult you. That's the way it should be. If it's the other way around, you have a problem.Collection: Teenage
From such a young age, I was raised and have raised myself on film to such an extent, that it has sometimes bled into my reality. There are times I've felt very Mulholland Drive, where people's dream worlds overlap with each other.Collection: Dream
Now that he's gone, I feel like I'm a senior citizen who gave away her life savings over the phone. And this is the crux: I never in my life believed in someone as much as I believed in him. The shame is overwhelming.Collection: Senior
We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.Collection: Dream
My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that comes close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines.Collection: Frustration
I think a neurotic learns from their mistakes. A psychotic does not.Collection: Mistake
When I am in a relationship, I don’t wear lipstick at all. I hate the smearing, the retouching, the constant throb of phoniness as you surreptitiously check the damage in your compact between kisses. I wear lots of mascara to compensate, different colors so I don’t get bored. When I am about to break up with a guy, he has full warning because I start wearing lipstick again.Collection: Hate
If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.Collection: Believe
In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.Collection: Struggle
I do think everything that happens in American pop culture sort of prescribes for England and does end up happening there six months later, maybe a year.Collection: Thinking
I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: “I can’t live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheets”. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.Collection: Notebook
When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.Collection: Hate
He was addicted to me and now he has gone cold turkey. He used to send me fifty texts a day. And now he is ignoring me. It's like I was once his Barack Obama. And now I am John McCain, conceding defeat like a sad-face sock puppet, knowing I have sold the best of myself. He, my electorate, not only does not want me, he actively feels pity.Collection: Turkeys
It's all in her walk, a cartoon swagger. Part Jayne Mansfield, part Muhammad Ali. Men never know if it's an invitation upstairs or an invitation outside.Collection: Men
I don't see what's so good about being genuine. Clog dancing is genuine. Isn't being fake more of an achievement? At least it takes some inspiration. Like, sherbet dips, they're a special food. Think of all the additives and coloring and grinding that it takes to create a sherbet dip. But carrots? They're just out there, shrieking, "Hi, we're some carrots! Love us for it!" They never have to prove themselves.Collection: Inspiration
At least you know where you are with blood. At least other people can see it.Collection: Blood
No one ever loved you like him. And no one ever took it away so completely. But it's here. Look around.Collection: Looks
Cyndi Lauper was hilarious and generous, someone I'd loved from childhood who didn't disappoint.Collection: Childhood
I think it's sort of the hypothetical point where communism and fascism meet. They love tragedy, and they love surface beauty. You just watch it play out over and over in the media. It was the English edition of Glamour who were looking for stories of Iraqi war widows, but specified that they had to be attractive.Collection: War
If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.Collection: Darkness
Jeff Bridges says that the reason he's one of the few stars in Hollywood whose made his marriage last for decades is that every time they think there's no more doors left to walk through in the room, they just keep looking and keep looking until they find one.Collection: Stars
Write a page every single day, even if what you put on the page that day is no good - it's the only way to get better.Collection: Writing
Someone asked me the other day, "Oh your story is like Cameron Crowe's, he has the same thing of having been a teenage journalist," but he was a guy and you just add gender into the mix, it's a 16-year-old girl with adults and rock stars, and it's tough.Collection: Girl
I enjoy films where two characters are coming of age, just different ages. That's why I love 'Paper Moon' so much.Collection: Character
I like the cuts - they comfort me - I can't lie.Collection: Lying
Thank God the Internet didn't exist when I was 15, 16. I knew people were tearing me apart, but my God, if there had been a net and commenters and I would have been reading them - it was bad enough as it was. To grow up in the media eye, I'm glad it happened, but that was definitely not healthy being around adults all the time.Collection: Growing Up
It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.Collection: Beautiful
You can have this kind of love. You can have it. You just grab it. Of course the problem with having that love is that you can lose it, too.Collection: Love You
My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean.Collection: Mean
I didn't know there was something really wrong, because everyone was crazy. It's just that everyone else was still functional. I didn't realize that I was any worse off.Collection: Crazy
Let me tell you something: when you dance, you are the greatest dancer who has ever lived. And when you sing, you will have the courage to raise your voice to the heavens, knowing that you may never get an answer.Collection: Voice
Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.Collection: Beautiful
It took a long time, but my heart now feels full when I think of him. When you fall in love again—which I have—it's funny the other things that come back in with that open-ness. You have this ghost chorus of the lovers who came before, but they're benign now, they're good spirits.Collection: Falling In Love