Geraldine DeRuiter > Quotes

“What matters is that you find the right person with whom to spend your time on this earth. Someone who will take care of you when you are sick. Who will love you and the extra hole in your head. Who will drive for hours while you sleep in the passenger seat. Someone who will show you how immense the universe is and still make you feel that you are the brightest thing in the sky.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft

“Sometimes it's best not to know what you are up against; if you are acutely aware of the challenges involved, you'd never do a damn thing. Being clueless is weirdly empowering. You can't worry about the things that you don't yet know you should be worried about. You end up doing wonderful things that you never would have had you been the least bit informed. You run off to Italy. You take horrific and beautiful hikes. You ruin your hair and your makeup and any chance of a future political career. And when it's all over, you can't help but feel anything but incredibly, overwhelmingly grateful (21)”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft

“I’m going to die. So are you, unless you’re a vampire, a zombie, or Keanu Reeves.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft

“Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Titties.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“I cannot see myself clearly, the way none of us can when we are twenty-one and sad and think that maybe no one should love us at all. It is like looking at a painting too close up.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“the backdrop was black with flames—redolent of an open-fire grill, a Harley-Davidson logo, or Guy Fieri’s formal wear.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Like any good, emotionally stunted writer, I've found linguistic loopholes to express my emotions while still preserving the labyrinthine collection of walls around my heart.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“It was the mid-1990s. We were told that “no means no,” but no one told us what happened after that. No one told me that “no” would just be perceived as a starting point in a negotiation.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Savala Nolan, author and director of the Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law, writes that the fat suit “perpetuates the categorically false and harmful myth that fat people are thin people for whom something went wrong, and that there is a thin person in every fat person who wants (‘deserves’) to get out.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“That’s the thing about voicing your needs: The world tells you how bad you’ll look if you do it. But no one tells you how great you’ll feel.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Sometimes you can’t let a complete dearth of natural talent or ability stop you from doing something.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft

“His approach was alarmingly effective: I’d started to question my own response to everything. The story he told so, so well was that I was overreacting, overemotional, defensive, difficult, high maintenance. And there was no way I could respond without proving him right.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Whoever said that time heals all wounds probably died of sepsis. It does not. But in the case of a broken heart, it does soften the edges of the pain a little bit.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“I’d never met someone more inept in the kitchen, and I say that with a grudging respect. For her age and demographic, she was an outlier.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“I suppose every human, holding the belief, erroneous or not, that they are under some sort of strange elemental peril that threatens their very being, comes to that same conclusion. It’s why Costco exists. A five-gallon barrel of tartar sauce gives you the illusion that your own mortality is in your control.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“They fear being forced into some unflattering or dangerous archetype that the world told them they’d be if they expressed the faintest glimmer of rage. The bitter ex, the stressed-out mom, the bossy exec, the man-hating feminist – the countless racist or sexist cliches that would be tossed at them for getting angry at the systemic injustices of the world (because misogyny has a thousand words for “unhinged bitch” but not a single one for “multiple female orgasm”).”
― Geraldine DeRuiter

“The woman cooked as if every ingredient were a piece of incriminating evidence she needed to render unrecognizable.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter

“I’ve accepted the feminist notion that women can do anything, but the idea that we don’t have to do certain things is taking a bit longer to sink in.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Mountain Dew tastes as if the entire product development team were going through a rough divorce.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“I know that memories alter the more you revisit them, and I want mine to re main pristine. I want to hold that memory still, as if it were stuck in a snow globe, protected and unchanged even as the world swirls around it.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“In health class, for reasons that made sense only to her, a teacher showed us the symbol for female – a circle with a cross underneath it – and told us that it was synonymous with abortion.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“When Thelma and Louise came out in 1991, there was a moral panic that feminists were going to go on murderous crime sprees. It was years before I would learn that feminists dimply wanted what everyone wanted: to be loved and respected, to spend some quality time with their best friends, and to maybe fuck Brad Pitt in his prime.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Which is a little like Brutus saying, “When Caesar was stabbed in the back.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“He adores me so completely that at least three of my in-laws have accused me of sexual witchcraft.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Even now as the window closes (is it a window? I don’t know. There are many analogies about the end of fertility, none of them good. They involved clocks grinding to a halt, or flowers withering, or reaching for an egg carton and finding out they're all gone, or maybe there’s one egg left, but it’s a little weird looking, and the shell is all rippled and strange and it’s probably from some sort of lizard), I’m hesitant to say those words: that I don’t want to be a mother. It sounds like a cold and calculated thing, something a comic supervillain would say before she starts up her penis-shrinking laser”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Maybe this is what we speak of when we talk about nostalgia. A longing not for a thing or a place but for a version of ourselves that is now gone, something that slipped through our fingers, piece by piece, day after day after day, without our realizing it.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Ihave developed a somewhat unfortunate habit. If my husband, Rand, is driving and we happen upon a Red Lobster, I will scream, with the urgency of someone who has been stabbed with something very sharp, for him to stop. “Absolutely not,” he will reply cheerfully.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“That if I want cheesy garlic biscuits, I can bake them. That if I wish to have a loving family, I can create one… I still somehow think that if someone treats you badly, even if you are a child, it is because you deserve it. This is, apparently, easier to wrap my head around than the alternative.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“Which is ridiculous, because I like almonds the maximum amount a person can like almonds, which is “barely.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

“There would be books and columns with names like “Hungry Bitch” and “Skinny Shrew” telling me how to replace things I wanted to eat with things I did not in order to be dissatisfied and thin.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury