Julia Fine > Quotes

“Memory...is a wild and private place to which we only return by accident, as in a dream or song.”
― Julia Fine, The Upstairs House

“To tell the story, Madenn reasoned, was to harness its power.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Nothing promises revival like a fairy tale.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Forward only, never back. Do not, in your mind, keep a tally of past horrors. Do not question decisions that cannot be unmade, dwell on actions that can not be undone. The power to equivocate is no power at all, and that you've ever thought it to be is your weakness.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Unfair, to have just one attempt at ripeness, a few brief years of possibility before sweetness turns to rot.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Imagine all your life the earth is green and brown and quiet. Your days pass slowly. You celebrate the sun. All magic is of trees and dappled shadows, all mountains peaked eruptions from an old ancestral earth, a ground so sacred there has been no cause to name it.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Life is not a riddle to be solved. The things that matter most cannot be won, cannot be tricked. They won't be studied, never fully understood.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Some questions are birthed, rather than asked, and having been born they will cry until tended. I knew the story of Pandora's box. I knew the cost of Eve tasting the apple. I didn't care. I was led by my desire.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“The way a memory is real, but also not real.” I spoke quickly, with bravado. “If time is one long line and we’re all moving across it, there has to be a place we’re headed, and a place that we’ve just left. Obviously, the memory is the place that we left.” Rafe seemed impressed.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Above him, around him, the elder dreams of soil. Dreams of glassy, glinting snow. Dreams of its own greatness - taller, wider, more light. It knows nothing of self-sabotage, regret, or restitution.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“How does a friendship begin? A conversation. An affinity. A secret.”
― Julia Fine, Maddalena and the Dark

“I became the pit of the fruit that had once been me, my meat eaten slowly, bite by fleshy bite.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Forward only, never back. Do not, in your mind, keep a tally of past horrors. Do not question decisions that cannot be unmade, dwell on actions that cannot be undone. The power to equivocate is no power at all, and that you've ever though it to be is your weakness.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“You think because you name it and tell it, it becomes? A story is a present, tied with a ribbon and a wish. Real things aren't so easy.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Was the unease he felt, the danger that he sensed, actual danger, or was it only love acknowledged? The object of his love made tender, appearing softer than she really was, appearing vulnerable in having made him vulnerable.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Tell her that after death comes heaven, harpists, bare-bottomed babes with sprouted wings. Show her where her mother has been eaten by the earth, where her ancestors lie buried.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“There is no better show of human power than to be a proud purveyor of death, to attempt slaughter. To kill for sport, for indulgence, speaks to the infinite depths of human desire, an innate need to demonstrate the irreversible, to have lasting effect.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Once they put you in a role, you can abandon or explode it.”
― Julia Fine, Maddalena and the Dark

“Who knew what spirits could be watching, what ancient impulse lay in wait?”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“When you whisper the name of the devil, he wakes from fiery depths to listen, but mostly to take.”
― Julia Fine, Maddalena and the Dark

“Better prepare for a new journey than contemplate the meaning of the one I had just taken,”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Here I was, pondering the incongruity of being a mother and an academic, of devoting oneself to two projects, which is to say living a life, which is, I guess, no incongruity at all. Merely living, merely choosing, in each moment, who and what to which you will attend. The Latin, atendere, means to stretch.”
― Julia Fine, The Upstairs House

“He was sweet. But he was oblivious in the way that straight, white men are oblivious; comfortable in the way only men can be comfortable. He had on a button-down and a Patagonia vest.”
― Julia Fine, The Upstairs House

“To kill for sport, for indulgence, speaks to the infinite depths of human desire,”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild

“Funny, how a man can be a cad and all will laugh at him, but a woman’s indiscretion is an undertow.”
― Julia Fine

“Even when they hate themselves, girls see themselves at the center. Even when they swear they aren't special, there is a buried seed of faith.”
― Julia Fine, Maddalena and the Dark

“Peter would have said that behaviors are determined by principles, theories.

That the difference between Theory of God and Theory of Not God was actually quite slim, each a slightly different lens through which to choose to view the world. One a shade lighter, the other negligibly darker—what mattered was that both were held up to the eye and used to filter our experience. It was easier to change the lens than to remove the vehicle of understanding, easier to adjust my sense of how I fit into the world than reconceive of the world entirely.”
― Julia Fine, What Should Be Wild