Your task is not to seek love, but to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

All I want is to find someone who makes me want to live – really live. Instead, I seem to find people who make me barely want to exist.

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

Stay around people who look more like your future than your past.

Be gentle. You are meeting parts of yourself you have been at war with.

You can’t force love, I realized. It’s there or it isn’t. If it’s not there, you’ve got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you’ve got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love.

Pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy.

You never had a childhood so you behave like a child in the worst ways. You pay for intimacy so you’re always in control and no one can get close to you. Your superficial connections and lack of authentic emotions will leave you isolated and alone, not just tonight, always.

To be sober means to give up the drug to which we are addicted to. In Anorexic Bulimic Anonymous, since we are addicted to the feeling of being in control of our food or weight or body shape, to be sober we need to surrender all control of our food and exercise and body weight and body shape to a Higher Power. Sobriety is not eating in a particular way, but rather surrendering to the way our Higher Power wills us to eat and to the body weight and shape our Higher Power wills us to have. In ABA we have learned that we cannot use willpower to get sober or stay sober; we can only receive sobriety as a daily gift from our Higher Power.