With or Without You Quotes

“Denial and the desire to self-destruct are elemental cousins; mining one yields the other in equal proportion.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You

“...that she loved me so much she couldn't help hating me; that at least once a week I still dream she is trying to kill me.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You

“We’re all ridiculously cute before we move on to solid foods. It’s a trick of evolution. Who would put up with us otherwise?”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“THE BUDDHISTS BELIEVE THAT every human life is like an ornament made of glass, something precious, beautiful, and bound to be destroyed. The trick is to see the world as a glass already shattered, freeing yourself from a life exhausted in dread of the moment of breaking.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“That’s when I see something I’ve never seen before in my life: my father in a state of bliss. He loves this pain, too. He loves it even more when it’s cold out. It’s the only way he can relax. I realize he is a man who would be lost in a bleak abyss if he did not surround himself with conflict, both physical and emotional. He’s a runner. So am I.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“Is it possible to have nostalgia for a time in which you never lived? I’m sure there is a word for this phenomenon in German—beautiful, absurd, and twenty letters long.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“Many women leave their reproductive years with wisdom and dignity, but not everyone crosses the threshold so willingly. Those women become the warty hags of our childhood fairy tales, the big-nosed, green-skinned witches with ovens equipped to broil a nubile thirteen-year-old girl. Envy is like oxygen to these miserable gorgons. They gargle with lamb’s blood and spit out napalm.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“Something happens to you, and then it’s gone. It becomes a memory that becomes shrapnel. Shards of experience still hot with life singe the brain wherever they happen to get embedded.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“A fact like that would seem hard to ignore, until you consider the human mind’s most maladaptive feat of intelligence: we have a remarkable ability to believe our own lies. Denial and the desire to self-destruct are elemental cousins; mining one yields the other in equal proportion.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“My mother was a creature that needed to lick her fingers and touch an open wire every once in a while.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“I decided this in the way that only children and dictators assume things, by pointing a finger and saying it is so.”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir

“YOU WERE SICK, BUT NOW YOU’RE WELL, AND THERE’S WORK TO DO. —Kurt Vonnegut”
― Domenica Ruta, With or Without You: A Memoir