Julia Glass Quotes

I grew up in a home where animals were ever-present and often dominated our lives. There were always horses, dogs, and cats, as well as a revolving infirmary of injured wildlife being nursed by my sister the aspiring vet.

We're all alive the day before we die.

All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.

... we're all alive the day before we die ... but, how alive is another question.

Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation.

A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, 'Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.'

Mind what you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved. As

I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.

Saints are merely tyrants in the kingdom of virtue.

People take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that.

Ever noticed how sisters, when they aren't best friends, make particularly vicious enemies?
-I See You Everywhere

But boys who like the tough sports - boys who are virtually nursed on that potion of hustle, slam, and grunt - they're the ones with the best chance in life.

In my fairly disorganized life, yellow stickies are too easily lost, and as for software, I try to avoid using my computer as much more than a typewriter and a post office. I rely on my lifelong habit of daydreaming to spin my stories.

A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

Winter sports aren't my thing. You can have your boards and blades and your glacier-gripping cleats: My feet prefer to negotiate the ground on a pair of dependable soles.

Everybody, will you please just sit for a minute?
Like children in a game of musical chairs, Tommy's three guests immediately reach for the nearest chair, pull it out from the table, and sit---even her brother. Well, says Tommy. Something in my life goes according to plan.

He pictured her living alone in that tranquil house with its fine old furnishings, tending her flowers and fruit trees.

I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.

There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.

Before heading back up the road, she had turned for a moment toward the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water was gray wrinkled with orange. Tiger water, she called it when it looked like that. Rhino water was smooth and leaden, dull as smoke. But her favorite was polar bear water, when the moon hung low and large, as if too heavy to rise very high, and scattered great radiant patches, like ice floes, across a dark blue ocean.

Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.

Happiness doesn't come easily, just because you want or even deserve it," she said. "I don't think you're too young to know that. So you've got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in, like capturing a bird.

feel as if I'm visiting home in a dream, where everything yet nothing is the way it should be, where the best of what you have and what you wish for are briefly, tantalizingly united. Tealing

Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.

Do you think too long a period of nightlessness," mused Sandra, "could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can?

What is the biggest tragedy you wouldn't be conscious of? Letting life pass you by. Living like a starfish, clinging to your one unchanging colorless rock.

It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

My tastes, like my bones, fossilized decades ago. Reach a certain age and you are obliged to become an anthropologist. It's the only way to ignore that the rest of the world regards you as an artifact, that your culture has faded beyond the horizon, leaving you adrift on your tiny, solitary life raft.

My own life is wonderful, but if I had to live the life of someone else, I'd gladly choose that of Julia Child or Dr. Seuss: two outrageously original people, each of whom fashioned an idiosyncratic wisdom, passion for life, and sense of humor into an art form that anyone and everyone could savor.

I continue to shun, in a very curmudgeonly fashion, things like Twitter and Facebook.

Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language.

When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.

Seven years ago, I joined a support group. The loneliness of my Clemlessness - privately, that's what I called it - had become so acute that I could feel it pulling me away, like an undertow, from the people I loved who were still alive. (I angered easily. I wanted to yell at them, "You don't fucking know!" - not just about what they might lose but about anything, everything: politics, art, laundry, taxes. I saw them as not just ignorant but smug, not just naïve but stupid.

I write because I'm in love with language; because I like working for myself, inside my head; and because it's the only way I know to make a stab at answering the never-ending questions of the heart that arise simply from the everyday living of our lives.

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams ... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

All that spring and summer, there were times when she felt as if she had no joints or muscles, no physical means with which to move about the world.

Most inexperienced cooks believe, mistakenly, that a fine cake is less challenging to produce than a fine souffle or mousse. I know, however, that a good cake is like a good marriage: from the outside, it looks ordinary, sometimes unremarkable, yet cut into it, taste it, and you know that it is nothing of the sort. It is the sublime result oflong and patient experience, a confection whose success relies on a profound understanding of compatibilities and tastes; on a respect for measurement, balance, chemistry and heat; on a history of countless errors overcome.

I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.

And there was the moon. A warm and visible greeting, a beacon of relief. Full, unshrouded, its edges crisp. It looked like an airy wafer- what were those crackers that came in the big green tin? She stared at the moon and thought about the fact that she was breathing. Fact of breathing, fact of life. This she could control: slow down and speed up her breathing, despite the pain in her throat. She'd never really looked at the moon, never really seen how intricate the etchings on its yellowy silver surface. Bowl of a spoon in candlelight. When she'd looked a long time- I see the moon, and the moon sees me- a glimmering ring like a rainbow materialized at the rim. In the memory she still retained, as clear as a framed snapshot, a portrait worn in a locket, Saga stared at the moon that way for hours, and it kept her company, it kept her sane, it kept her in one piece, it kept her alive. It was proof, fact, patience, faith.

Colorful garments - ball gowns, kimonos, evening pajamas - made from yards upon yards of iridescent silk or velvet. I own an unjustifiable number of such outfits and jump at the chance to wear them. Against the etiquette about which I am otherwise all too conscious, I frequently, and unrepentantly, overdress for the occasion.

Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.

I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.

Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important?

Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love or into thinking that you are.

All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces.

I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way.

Though I'm a New Englander, I'm very indoorsy once the mercury drops.

We do not demonstrate against anything. Our group is about being for something, never against. No antis except on my family tree.

Elizabeth Spencer.

Finally, in my early 30s, I started writing fiction for the first time as an adult. That felt so scary, and I spent a few years feeling miserably 'behind' my high-achieving friends. But I persevered and obviously have no regrets.

When it comes to love, dogs make pretty steep competition for us people. And rightly so.

I talked late, swam late, did not learn to ride a bike until college - and might never have walked or learned to drive a car if my parents hadn't overruled my lack of motivation and virtually forced me to embrace both forms of transportation. I suspect I was happy to sit in a corner with a book.

And then there's the personal question so many of Lassie's fans want to ask: Is he allowed on the furniture? Of course he is-but, then, he's the one who paid for it.

Ira felt as if he'd contracted an all-over emotional itch, as if he'd put on a sweater made of spiritually abrasive wool- but to take it off would leave him dreadfully cold.

Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do.

But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greenie, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps they were like recipes, he pondered now, and the key to success was in finding the ingredients you had to remove, the components that turned all the others bitter, excessively salty, difficult to swallow; even too jarringly sweet. He had seen Greenie clarify butter, wash rice, devein shrimp, and meticulously snip the talons from artichoke leaves.

When the girls were small, I heard Poppy tell one of her friends, "I don't see how you could ever have a favorite when there are just two: one will always and forever be your first, the miracle baby, the one who paves the way, strikes out for adventure - the intrepid one, the one who teaches you how to do what nature intended all along - and the other, oh the other will always be your baby, your darling, the one you surprised yourself by loving just as desperately much as you loved the first." Pursuant

To have children is to plant roses, muguets, lavender, lilac, gardenia, stock, peonies, tuberose, hyacinth ... it is to achieve a whole sense,a grand sense one did not priorly know. It is to give one's garden another dimension. Perfume of life itself.

The older Kit gets, the less confident he feels judging other people as spouses or parents. These days, driving past the home of the Naked Hemp Society, he finds himself more curious than contemptuous about their easily ridiculed New Age ways. Why shouldn't they nurse their babies till age four? Why shouldn't they want to keep their children away from factory-farmed meats, from clothing soaked in fire-retardant chemicals, from dull-witted burned-out public school teachers whose tenure is all too easily approved? Why not frolic naked in the sprinkler
under the full moon, perhaps? Why not turn one's family into a small nurturing country protected by a virtual moat?

Chemotherapy can be a long, tough haul - for me, it went on for six months - and the best doctors and nurses become, if only for that period of time, as essential in your life as friends or spouses.

From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream.

Well, yes, there were quite a lot of books throughout, tumbling out of haphazardly placed bookshelves, stacked beneath chairs, beside beds, even in the bottoms of a closet or two. But I was never a "collector." My love of books is a love of what they contain; they hold knowledge as a pitcher holds water, as a dress contains the mystery of a woman's exquisite body. Their physicality matters
do not speak to me of storing books as bytes!
but they should not inspire fetishistic devotion.

I don't see how you can write well if you're not reading well at the same time. I think the only risk is reading too many books of one 'type' in a row.

That's why you can't be a true Yankee without winter: because all the best pleasures are earned - the fire, the fried oysters; the warmer seasons, too. Who knows the real worth of summer at the beach without a good taste of the seaside in winter?

My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon.

Rage cools fast without an accessible target.

Always more to learn, that's the pain and the pleasure

I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

The old adage is, 'Write what you know.' But if you only do that, your work becomes claustrophobic. I say, 'Write what you want to know.'