Julia Glass > Quotes

“When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“Mind who you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“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.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“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.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.”
― Julia Glass

“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.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, the currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love or into thinking that you are.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“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.”
― Julia Glass, The Whole World Over

“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.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“People take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.”
― Julia Glass, And the Dark Sacred Night

“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.”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“When it comes to love, dogs make pretty steep competition for us people. And rightly so.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes

“Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important?”
― Julia Glass, The Widower's Tale

“Ever noticed how sisters, when they aren't best friends, make particularly vicious enemies?”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“Rage cools fast without an accessible target.”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“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.”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“Always more to learn, that's the pain and the pleasure”
― Julia Glass, And the Dark Sacred Night

“The past is like the night: dark but sacred. It's the time when most of us sleep, so we think of the day as the time we really live, the only time that matters, because the stuff we do by day somehow makes us who we are. We feel the same way about the present. We say, let bygones be bygones... Water under the bridge. But there is no day without night, no wakefulness without sleep, no present without past. They are constantly somersaulting over each other.”
― Julia Glass, And the Dark Sacred Night

“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.”
― Julia Glass, The Widower's Tale

“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.”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“I'd suffocate. From my own cowardice.”
― Julia Glass, And the Dark Sacred Night

“Here was someone you simply knew you could trust, who might nag or infuriate or sulk, but whose greatest charm lay on the most durable of virtues: loyalty.”
― Julia Glass, And the Dark Sacred Night

“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.”
― Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

“You have not truly met someone until you have looked him or her in the eye as a soul with a place in your future.”
― Julia Glass, The Widower's Tale

“It was Friday, so the farmers' market was in full autumnal swing, a sea of potted chrysanthemums and bushel after bushel of apples, pears, Fauvist gourds, and pumpkins with erotically fanciful stems. On one table stood galvanized buckets of the year's final roses; on another, skeins of yarn in muted, soulful purples and reds. Walter loved this part of the season- and not just because it was the time of year his restaurant flourished, when people felt the first yearnings to sit by a fire, to eat stew and bread pudding and meatloaf, drink cider and toddies and cocoa. He loved the season's transient intensity, its gaudy colors and tempestuous skies.”
― Julia Glass, The Whole World Over

“... we're all alive the day before we die ... but, how alive is another question.”
― Julia Glass, Three Junes