Julia Keller > Quotes

“We are defined not so much by what we're reading, as by what we're reading next.”
― Julia Keller

“Maybe if you carried bad memories around long enough, they started to change how you walked, how you talked. How you thought.”
― Julia Keller

“The past was a tricky bastard. It called and called to you—and when you turned around and tried to grasp it, it disappeared.”
― Julia Keller, Last Ragged Breath

“There was a time when he'd envied anyone who left Acker's Gap, when he watched them go and felt a kind of wild yearning--but something was shifting inside him. There was a certain solace to knowing a world this well. You knew its flaws, its shortcomings, just as you knew its beauties. And you learned to love it all. You loved the abundance of it, the sweep and immensity of the land, and you loved the sadness and the lack, too.To walk each day on ground that had given rise to you: that was a privilege. Not a curse.”
― Julia Keller

“They awoke hours later to a battering-ram headache and upended chairs and shattered glassware and a large lurking pocket of nothingness where the memory of the night before ought to have been.”
― Julia Keller, Sorrow Road

“Bell never did find an artful way to her endless line of callers that nothing-- not even a mother- in- law's decades-long obnoxiousness --justified murder.”
― Julia Keller, A Killing in the Hills

“She knew the truth of the old West Virginia aphorism: Hit dogs howl. If you felt like someone had done you wrong, you reacted. You had to. Didn’t you?”
― Julia Keller, Last Ragged Breath

“We’ve all heard the old saw: Don’t quit a job (or a love affair) until you’ve got another one lined up, ready to go.”
― Julia Keller, Quitting: A Life Strategy: The Myth of Perseverance—and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free

“By doing nothing, we change nothing. And by changing nothing, we hang on to what we understand, even if it is the bars of our own jail. —John le Carré”
― Julia Keller, Quitting: A Life Strategy: The Myth of Perseverance—and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free