Quotes from It Was Me All Along

Andie Mitchell ·  240 pages

Rating: (10.4K votes)


“Can you do it today? The notion of just trying to take each day as it came. The commitment to the present moment, and only the present moment, without worrying about the big and daunting picture of all the days that followed.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“I was trying to lose weight on the surface, but deeper, I was acknowledging that I’d been wrong for sixteen years and had to work to right myself. How do you walk away from all you’ve ever been?”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“The wanting to be different in order to be perceived as better, yet wishing I didn’t have to try so hard.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“A part of me was disdainful of the newfound attention I was receiving. You see me now? I’m attractive now? Receiving the congratulations, the praises in some small way felt like accepting that what I’d been before—all of my life—was wrong. Even though I’d often felt that way myself, I resented that the size of my body was correlated to my value, my worth as a person.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“Can you do it today? Can you make it through today without bingeing? Just today, and tomorrow we’ll reconsider?”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along



“I will always know that the grass, though it seems emerald and glowing in that field on the other side—it isn’t. Flowers grow here. They grow over there. Weeds do, too. But both are wide, and they’re open. And I can lie and cry in one and move and spin in the other, all while knowing this: they’re the same field. And they’re both mine.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“Can u exercise today? Not tomorrow or the next day!”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“I want to quit, I want to quit, I want to quit. And when I’m done quitting, I’d like to quit again.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“But after all highs comes a low.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“I realized that I couldn’t knowingly look to food for a way out when it had so clearly led me here. It wasn’t hunger that beckoned me to eat more. It wasn’t my stomach that needed to be reconciled. It was shame. It was guilt. And food can’t remedy such things”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along



“i rearrange the jagged stars of your past”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“like taking one bite into something I couldn’t quite place. It was layered and complex, an unfamiliar taste I liked enough to crave more of instantly. Perhaps what lured me most was that it was never enough to feel sated. There was always a gentle nuance to him, something new I’d just begun to discover.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“In all of my life, the friends I’d kept had always been eaters just like me. We were second-serving-grabbing, lick-your-plate-clean, can-I-get-an-extra-scoop-of-that eaters. We wore our affection for food as a badge of honor, as though eating wildly indicated fearlessness. As though eating big meant living big.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“Time and mood were always regulated by Dad. Our whole family was set to the thermostat, boiling or freezing, inside of him. When”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“What worried me almost as much as letting myself down if I gained it all back, was letting everyone else down. Being a failure. The pressure, the foreignness of it all caused the welling up of a deep, deep insecurity.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along



“…there was no more that I could do to make myself look better in that moment than smile and be kind…”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“For the first time, I appeared healthy on the outside. I wanted so badly to conceal the fact that, despite a radical transformation, I remained as screwed up as I had ever been.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“Unhelpfully, a friend of the family reminded me, 'You know, Andrea, losing weight is the easy part. It's maintaining it that's really hard.' This sentiment made me seethe. How dare anyone minimize that struggle, that agonizing journey of losing weight?”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“I was ashamed that I couldn't just feel better.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“I am a lifetime practitioner of secretive eating, after all. As a kid who entered an empty house after school each day, I felt a desperation to eat. I knew no way other than eating to alleviate the loneliness, to fill in the spaces where comfort and security could have been. Food poured over the millions of cracks in the foundation of my family; it seeped into the fissures; it narrowed the chasms.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along



“The thing is- It's easy to find the bad. I'm cynical at times. Pessimistic and realistic. I can, and do, look at situations in pros and cons.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“A really frustrating part was realizing that being boy crazy wasn’t even a worthwhile pastime. You can’t be boy crazy if no boy would ever be crazy for a girl like you. You can’t fantasize about your first kiss if you can’t even imagine that a boy—any boy—would kiss you.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“I knew no way other than eating to alleviate the loneliness, to fill in the spaces where comfort and security could have been.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“I struggled between wishing away all the food that had collected on my body as fat and fiercely missing every morsel. I hated the binge last weekend, and I wished I could do it again. I wanted to eat less, and I wanted immediately to eat more.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“n an ideal world, a child learns eating as intuitive practice. She seeks out and savors what she wants when she feels hungry. She stops when her stomach sends signals to her brain…Gentle bodily sensations are the sole system she needs to rely on.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along



“Having always struggled with consistency in dieting, I began journaling what and how much I ate. This single act changed the way I viewed and valued eating, teaching me accountability and an awareness of my own hunger and fullness.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“I resented having to live differently, just so that I could be the same.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“How do you walk away from all you've ever been?”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


“The change I’d undergone—from someone who ate to capacity to distract her mind, into someone who purposely tasted every morsel—was not unconscious…I put my fork down between bites instead of making like a shovel and digging in. I let a forkful of food sit on my tongue in order to observe its flavor, to savor it. I paused often during the meal to check in with my hunger and fullness.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along


About the author

Andie Mitchell
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“I've met people in the last year or two who have stopped going to their local church because people have started singing new songs and dancing in the aisles. And I've met others who have started going for precisely the same reason. It's time to give ourselves a shake--to recognize that different people need different kinds of help at different stages of their lives--and get on with it.”
― N.T. Wright, quote from Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense


“Many readers say they also feel like outcasts in their hometowns, oppressed by religionists, racists, homophobes, or other pea-brained busybodies. The advice I give them is this: If you feel like a misfit in the place where you were born, move somewhere else. I did. I now reside in the most progressive town in the country—Berkeley, California.”
― Julia Scheeres, quote from Jesus Land: A Memoir


“Now he had her full attention. Not only because she wanted to know what had happened, but because anyone who’d get up at two in the morning to smack a melon in the dark deserved attention. Perhaps even medical attention.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Brutal Telling


“A Day Away We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true, or if it is true, then our situations were so temporary that they would have collapsed anyway. Once a year or so I give myself a day away. On the eve of my day of absence, I begin to unwrap the bonds which hold me in harness. I inform housemates, my family and close friends that I will not be reachable for twenty-four hours; then I disengage the telephone. I turn the radio dial to an all-music station, preferably one which plays the soothing golden oldies. I sit for at least an hour in a very hot tub; then I lay out my clothes in preparation for my morning escape, and knowing that nothing will disturb me, I sleep the sleep of the just. On the morning I wake naturally, for I will have set no clock, nor informed my body timepiece when it should alarm. I dress in comfortable shoes and casual clothes and leave my house going no place. If I am living in a city, I wander streets, window-shop, or gaze at buildings. I enter and leave public parks, libraries, the lobbies of skyscrapers, and movie houses. I stay in no place for very long. On the getaway day I try for amnesia. I do not want to know my name, where I live, or how many dire responsibilities rest on my shoulders. I detest encountering even the closest friend, for then I am reminded of who I am, and the circumstances of my life, which I want to forget for a while. Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, lovers, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops. If we step away for a time, we are not, as many may think and some will accuse, being irresponsible, but rather we are preparing ourselves to more ably perform our duties and discharge our obligations. When I return home, I am always surprised to find some questions I sought to evade had been answered and some entanglements I had hoped to flee had become unraveled in my absence. A day away acts as a spring tonic. It can dispel rancor, transform indecision, and renew the spirit.”
― Maya Angelou, quote from Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now


“The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood”
― Richard Paul Evans, quote from The Christmas Box


Interesting books

Uljas uusi maailma
(1.2M)
Uljas uusi maailma
by Aldous Huxley
Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball
(4K)
The Dumb House
(1.5K)
The Dumb House
by John Burnside
Old Filth
(10.6K)
Old Filth
by Jane Gardam
Moon Rising
(5.6K)
Moon Rising
by Tui T. Sutherland
Eleanor and Park
(650.8K)
Eleanor and Park
by Rainbow Rowell

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.