How to Set Yourself on Fire Quotes

“THE DOWNTOWN LIBRARY IS strangely lovely. All these people all doing the same things individually, apart. It's my favorite type of community, the type where I can coexist but not have to look anyone in the eye.”
― Julia Dixon Evans, How to Set Yourself on Fire

“I think about my mother. I lived inside of her for forty weeks and three days. I didn’t breathe except for the oxygen she gave me l straight from her blood. She grew a new organ just to feed me. I learned to move while curled toward her guts. I grew fingernails and hair before I ever left her body. I pissed and shit meconium tucked up inside her. While still in the womb, my own ovaries filled with six, maybe seven million eggs of my own- six, maybe seven million possible children of mine, my cells dividing and regenerating to the thrum of my mother's heart. Everything about me was finished while we were still together.”
― Julia Dixon Evans, How to Set Yourself on Fire

“There's nothing wrong with me. This has been medically proven, once. My former insurance company stopped honoring my requests for more diagnostics and labs. A therapist gave me medicine but I didn't take it because she didn't even run tests. She based her diagnosis on my answers, on the things I told her, and I bullshitted so much I couldn't even remember which parts were genuine. How could I take a pill based on that? And what if it worked? What if my bullshit was the right-sized hole for a pill-shaped fix? I felt helpless in the face of someone helping me.”
― Julia Dixon Evans, How to Set Yourself on Fire

“I can acknowledge the desire to have some concrete pain to fill the spaces where my twisted mind expects it”
― Julia Dixon Evans, How to Set Yourself on Fire

“I met a girl with childhood arthritis, someone with celiac disease, and someone with lupus. I never told any of these people that I was jealous. I didn't really comprehend it myself. I just wanted to feel special, unique, and have problems that other people would never understand.”
― Julia Dixon Evans, How to Set Yourself on Fire

“I try to remind myself not to frighten this stranger who, standing across from me, forms some sort of ancestral mirror of two tormented souls.”
― Julia Dixon Evans, How to Set Yourself on Fire

“How many other burning places will it take for us to feel each other?”
― Julia Dixon Evans, How to Set Yourself on Fire