Julianna Baggott Quotes

I'd always wanted to know what it was like. Happiness.

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.

The fact is there are many women who nod politely, even agree openly within their male-dominated often highly educated cultures, but vote their own minds.

I don't have a favorite. I need different genres at different times.

She glances back before stepping into the alley, and she catches her grandfather looking at her the way he does sometimes
as if she's already gone, as if he's practicing sorrow.

To know someone, to be known. That matters more than he'd ever thought it would.

She let him go once. Every day demands that she release him over and over again.

You learn to exploit genre for the more important things - to my mind - like story, character, image, language.

Will you be my wife forever? Here and now and beyond all of this?

I am politically pro-choice, but personally pro-life. I have my faith but refuse to force it on the world at large - especially this world, so brutal and unjust. I cannot make these wrenching personal life and death decisions for others - nor do I believe they should be made by a church run by childless men.

Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor.

Basically if you burst into my office the walls themselves will flutter as if alive - maybe that's the reason for all the wings in 'Pure.'

Sometimes Partridge imagines that this isn't real, that, instead, it's just some elaborate reenactment of destruction, not the actual destruction itself. He remembers once being in a museum on a class trip. There were miniature displays with live actors in various wings, talking about what things were like before the Return of Civility. Each display was dedicated to a theme: before the impressive prison system was built, before difficult children were properly medicated, when feminism didn't encourage femininity, when the media was hostile to government instead of working toward a greater good, before people with dangerous ideas were properly identified, back when government had to ask permission to protect its good citizens from the evils of the world and from the evils among us, before the gates had gone up around neighborhoods with buzzer systems and friendly men at gatehouses who knew everyone by name.

In the heat of the day, there were battle reenactments on the museum's wide lawn that showed the uprisings waged in certain cities against the Return of Civility and its legislation. With the military behind the government, the uprisings - usually political demonstrations that became violent - were easily tamped down. The government's domestic militia, the Righteous Red Wave, came to save the day. The recorded sounds were deafening, Uzis and attack sirens pouring from speakers. The kids in his class bought bullhorns, very realistic hand grenades, and Righteous R

Scars are good. Right, Helmud? It's the body's way of making armour.

His wings - she's never seen them fully spread, massive and strong. She wants to tell him that this is how he was meant to be - as wrong as it was for her to do this to him, as wrong as it feels, he is this person in this moment, and there's nothing more beautiful.

My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.

The truth is that for those 86 long years when the Red Sox went without a World Series win, fans were not only in a recession, but trapped in a longstanding, deeply entrenched sports depression.

And I knew that I loved him with more than a nod. I loved him with a rush of tenderness, a lion's share. (Is that ever enough?)
I wanted to survive. I had to. I never called.

The sky is a bruise, only a storm will heal it.

Sometimes your secrets are your only value.

The dirt," he says, his voice strangely peaceful. "What about it?" she asks. "It's dirty.

Our love is our burden.

It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

I am deeply Catholic and always will be, but I'm no longer a member of the church. I left in 2003 because of the sex abuse scandal.

One of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling - even fleetingly - that I'm not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself.

I miss art. I miss art. Life would be worth living if I had art.

We're wretches but we're still capable of this - songs rising up inside us.

She started telling Lyda stories, odd nameless placeless stories, about the man and the woman, myths or memories, perhaps from her own childhood.

Our stories are what we have," Our Good Mother says. "Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?

Women are constantly underestimated in our power, our reach, our collective pull.

When I first met you, I thought we were made for each other even though we seemed like opposites in some ways and we fought. But now ... "
"What?"
"Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other - into the people we should become. Do you know what I mean?

Finally she said, "When I grow up, I'm going to live out here. I'll probably be a Miss Somebody, too ... "
Don't grow up," I told her. "It only gets more confusing.

I'm a woman, but I've been a sexist, too.

If men are paid/praised more than women for the same work than it always pays to allow the man to have more freedom to pour himself into his work - think of athletes, actors over the age of 28, lawyers, accountants, college deans ...

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books ... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

Being cross-genre, you can encounter an image and decide not only how to best express it but what form would express it best.

Writers are socially observant. We find people endlessly fascinating, and real life is mysterious. Sometimes it's hard to stop staring at the strut and squawk of my fellow man. They can be quite inspiring. Sometimes it's hard to stop talking to them to see what in the world they're thinking.

Don't shame the young for releasing their pent-up fear.

Maybe Helmund is an angel after all. Maybe that's who he's been all along.

The poem has to bear the weight with image, language ... the screenplay with dialogue, plot ...

Once upon a time, privacy was valued. For goodness' sake, a disabled president of the United States could ask that the press not photograph him in a wheelchair or being transferred to his car or generally in a weakened state, and the press would oblige. Those were the days.

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.'

Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.

People know the difference between good and evil in their hearts - if they search them. Religions twist good and evil. Their differences are the kind that need to be taught because they aren't natural.

I prefer true over happy now.

She knows that whispers can be useful. Sometimes they contain real information. But usually they're fairy tales and lies. This is the worst kind of whisper, the kind that draws you in, gives you hope.

Even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed.

I always doubt people ... I've survived by not believing in other human beings.

Sometimes you meet someone and you know that your life will be different from then on.

If home isn't a place, what is it?'

'A feeling.

I'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination.

Love is a luxury. It's something that people are allowed to indulge in when they're not simply trying to survive and keep other people alive.

For the first time in as long as he can remember, El Capitan is proud of his brother. Damn it, Helmud! Shit! You've been planning to kill me!

Genres are just bottles for the various boats. The boats matter to me.

I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.

Perhaps we're all doomed to fail as mothers, but if so, it's better to err on the side of showing too much love, not too little".

So far, I should be calm and more specifically not like that...Anything else? Would you like to do surgery on my personality? How about open-heart surgery? I´ve got some tools

I believe we're brutes, but then, miraculously, there are those among us who stand up against that brutishness and remind us of the goodness we're capable of.

Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should.

I don't know when I'm writing dark. I don't know when I'm writing funny or even heartbreaking. I'm always just trying to write it true.

I feel too much. It's like being drummed to death from within. You know?

She feels sick. She hates this world.

The ugliness is what makes the beautiful things beautiful.

All this time, you've been lying to me!

The world is frenzied - giving and taking.

Here, falling in love can be an event, a proclamation without acknowledging that everyone you love could die an awful death, that loving someone is an acceptance of impending loss.

Writing across genres has made me more prolific. When one is fighting me or simply not cutting it, I turn to another.

First, you hand over some basics--overwhelming joy, existential angst, a giving-in to desire, etc. And then you promise to withstand talking idly about the weather, to encourage cliché, to uphold the virtues of average. You hand over the need to be understood and, in return, you get a bar of Normal soap. And you can wash in it and be daily reborn to a safe world of modest, enduring love or, at least, mild, well-mannered bonding.

I have faith in human beings. I struggle with that faith.

When you're in the world looking for only one thing, you find it or it finds you. The obsession can be mutual

The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.

We each have a story. They did this to us. There was no outside aggressor. They wanted an Apocalypse. They wanted the end. And they made it happen. It was orchestrated - who got in, who didn't. There was a master list. We weren't on it. We were left here to die. They want to erase us, the past, but we can't let them.

I didn't start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself.

The truth that writers secretly harbor is that all books are failures. We try to do something that can't be done. Words. Is that all we rely on? Smudgy ink marks on a page? Pallid wisps and blotches? Text as scaffolding trying to hold up worlds? Actually, no, it's not all we rely on. What's worse is our reliance on the reader. A writer is forever locked in an interdependent relationship. It's like building a bridge from opposite sides of a river - our flimsy words and their frail, overreaching imaginations. The bridge will never meet in the middle. It's not possible. Sometimes you haven't even decided on the same river. The Gateway Arch in Saint Louis missed in the middle by a matter of inches the first time around. They tried again and made it. Writers know we never will.

I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

They need eachother. They always have and always will. Maybe he should just be happy with that fact. Not everyone gets to need someone and to be needed permanently, forever.

Love is selfless, it is a weakness, a giving in, a constant falling.

I've either been in love a dozen times or never. I can't tell.

I'm about to start something new. I'm waiting to be whelmed. The whelming as you start something new is quite something.

You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.

Omission is a sin only if, in the process of deceiving, you forget the truth. Lying is a sin only if, in the process, the lie becomes the only truth.

If you look at the world one way, it takes from you - it's a thief of time, energy, creative mojo. But if you look at the world another way, it gives you an endless supply of motivation.

Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other
into the people we should become.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

I've left the Church - for many reasons that I've written about publicly - but it's still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.

How do you know me?" she says.
He looks at her through his narrow eyes. "I was," he says.
"You were what?" she asks.
"I was," he says again. "And now I'm not.

Is it wrong to kill something that wants to kill you?

Father can be the person you most hate and most fear, yes, but deep down you expect that he'll be the one to save you.

Memories are like water.

When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher.

But this kind of love can't survive. Love's a luxury.

No matter what losses happen in a given season, the Red Sox always have next year.

But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

[She] knows that it's fear that keeps her love in check. but what if falling in love i a sign not of weakness but of courage? what if it isnt falling or crashing but taking a leap?

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

But she's still afraid that the more she misses him
his face, his skin, the way he looked at her
and the more hope she has that she'll see him again, the more she has to lose.

I've never thought there was anything I could hope to get by praying for it.

Don't talk about dying? You want me to talk about love. They're one and the same, child. One and the same.