Julia Phillips > Quotes

“You believe that you keep yourself safe, she thought. You lock up your mind and guard your reactions so nobody, not an interrogator or a parent or a friend, will break in. You earn a graduate degree and a good position. You keep your savings in foreign currency and you pay your bills on time. When your colleagues ask you about your home life, you don't answer. You work harder. You exercise. Your clothing flatters. You keep the edge of your affection sharp, a knife, so that those near you know how to handle it carefully. You think you established some protection and then you discover that you endangered yourself to everyone you ever met.”
― Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth

“Loving someone close-up - that was difficult.”
― Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth

“Books, buckles, papers, and scarves. After Gleb's accident, she thought she would die. She thought she had. This date took him and pulled her down after, grief determined gravity. But now she would live. She had to. It was what she did: live while others could not. There was no pleasure in it.”
― Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth

“She was not a woman made for sitting home and nursing. She craved things darker, stranger, out of bounds.”
― Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth

“Con la distancia, todo el el mundo parece mejor. Todo el mundo parece más agradable cuando no tienes que escucharlo continuamente. Después de que Yuri colgara, Natasha pasó junto a su hermano, en el muro, y su madre, que estaba limpiándose las gafas al lado. Querer a quienes tienes cerca..., eso es lo difícil.”
― Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth

“Everyone looked better at a distance. Everyone sounded sweetest when you did not have to hear them talk too long.”
― Julia Phillips

“Okay? Do you remember the end of the story? What the villagers say? No one helps them but they help each other. Even though their town is gone, and all they see is water in every direction, they swim for land. We can make it, they say. We’re going to help each other the whole way.”
― Julia Phillips

“Sophia, sandals off, was standing at the water’s edge.

-Disappearing Earth”
― Julia Phillips

“In the sunset, the pebbles on the shore shifted their color from black and gray to honey. They were brightening. Soon the stones would glow, and the water in the bay was going to turn pink and orange. Spectacular in the city center, where people feared to have their pretty daughters go”
― Julia Phillips

“She had visited these woods as a child, and though she must be seeing two decades of growth, the birch trees in the starlight looked to her exactly as they had when she was a girl: aged and grand and magical. The world outside had steadily warped, become less predictable and more dangerous, while spots like this were protected. Here, there was no radio news, no city stresses, no schedule to disrupt.”
― Julia Phillips