Julia Reck > Julia's Quotes

“Having to struggle doesn't necessarily make you interesting. It might just make you tired. I want my work to be seen, to be part of the conversation of my art form, to collaborate with people I admire and respect. But these things are only important. They aren't sacred. The sacred thing is to feel, if only for a moment, that I'm not consuming, or forgetting, or losing the things of this world, but adding to them. That I have made something true, or beautiful, or both. That I might do it again.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“The first step isn't physical. It's the belief that what's inside you is important enough to repeat, and refine.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“This is my legacy. I come from people who are in the back of the photo. This is my inheritance: to know the precise distance between oneself, and greatness.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“But by then, I've discovered the pleasures of solitude, and acquired the habit of loneliness.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“I used to joke I'd escaped the curse of the male gaze, because so many men have to physically look up to meet my eyes. But the male gaze is a gods-eye view. Which is to say: omni-present, and internalized. There's still a man in the mirror, watching me look at myself.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“And maybe he wanted her to be the kind of girl who dressed as Queen Mab, who loved words and had stars in her blood.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“Well, maybe there was something broken and shriveled inside of her, because she only felt a deep calm in knowing what she was capable of.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“He’d told himself he was giving her a chance, being fair to this girl who had washed up on his shore. But he’d let himself think of her as someone who had made all of the wrong choices and stumbled down the wrong path. It hadn’t occurred to him that she was being chased.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“ If you want to live.
And wasn't that the worst of it? She did. She did want to live and always had.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“A lie isn't a lie until someone believes it. It doesn't matter how charming you are if there's no one to charm.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“You rescue me. I rescue you. That’s how
this works. To pay your debts, you had to know who you owed. You had to decide who you were willing to go to war for and who you trusted to jump into the fray for you. That was all there was in this world. No heroes or villains, just the people you’d brave the waves for, and the ones you’d let drown.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

“But I was getting better, getting really good. And I knew that. I knew that when I showed the song to him. But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that. Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“I knew getting high wasn’t a long-term solution. But God, it’s so easy. It’s just so easy. But of course, it’s not easy at all, either. Because one minute you’re just trying to nurse a wound. And the next, you’re desperately trying to hide the fact that you’re now a jury-rigged, taped-up, shortcutted mess of a person and the wound you were nursing has become an abscess. But I was skinny and pretty so who cared, right?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“And Daisy didn’t actually have confidence. She was always good. Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“I used to care when men called me difficult. I really did. Then I stopped. This way is better.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“It's so strange, how someone's silence, someone's insistence that something isn't happening can be so suffocating. But it can be. And suffocating is exactly the word, too. You feel like you can't breathe.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing. And I was proud of what I did”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Did Billy’s actions really warrant the song? Probably not. I mean, no. They didn’t. But that’s the thing. Art doesn’t owe anything to anyone.
Songs are about how it felt, not the facts. Self-expression is about what it feels to live, not whether you had any right to claim any emotion at any time. Did I have a right to be mad at him? Did he do anything wrong? Who cares! Who cares? I hurt. So I wrote about it.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Right around this same time—give or take a few years, I can't remember—Camila got a call from this guy from her high school. Some guy that was on the baseball team and took her to the prom and all that. I think his name was Greg Egan or Gary Egan? Something like that.

She said to me, "I'm gonna go get lunch with Gary Egan." And I said, "Okay." And she went and got lunch with him and she was gone for four hours. No one eats lunch for four hours.

When she got back, she gave me a kiss and she, you know, started doing laundry or something and I said, "How was your lunch with Greg Egan?" And she said, "Fine." And that's all she said.

In that moment, I knew that what happened between her and Gary Egan—whether she still felt anything for him, how he felt about her, anything that might have taken place—all of that wasn't my business. It wasn't anything she wanted to share. That was a singular moment for her and it had nothing to do with me.

I'm not saying that I didn't care. I cared a lot. I'm saying that when you really love someone, sometimes the things they need may hurt you, and some people are worth hurting for.

I had hurt Camila. God knows I had. But loving somebody isn't perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it's a gut punch. That's why it's a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn't deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else's. It's sacred.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Do you know what you do with that level of trust? When someone says, 'I trust you so much I can tolerate you having secrets?' You cherish it. You remind yourself how lucky you are to have been given that trust every day.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“Your father is a man who needs devotion. I mean, he needs to be devoted to something. If ballet hadn't gotten him, religion might have. Or maybe he would have joined the military. I think we can all agree ballet was the best option.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“I miss talking with him,” he says. “I used to think I didn’t like most people. But it’s more that I don’t like myself around most people. I’m way more interesting and smarter around James. We’d separate for the night, you know, and I’d walk back to my place feeling like, I don’t know. Like I was a part of art or something.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“There was a time when all I wanted in the world was Bank Street. I didn’t call it that, I called it wanting to be a ballet dancer. I failed at both. But I’m not that girl anymore, and her dreams are no longer my dreams. Why should I feel like I failed her?
I’m not that girl anymore.
Oh, she’s still there.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“All this wasted time. For nothing. For ego. Because nobody could get exactly what they wanted. Because nobody knew how to stop themselves from being themselves.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“Good person, bad person. Success, failure. Outside, inside. These are danceable truths. To be flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. That’s danceable too. But the work of my life has been to ask undanceable questions and find a way to make ballets out of them. There’s nothing to do with this dance but be still.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“Not everything is a test,” she says gently. “Of how much you can stand on your own.”
― Meg Howrey, They're Going to Love You

“Yours is a strange and stubborn endurance, Velasin. Just like your mothers.”
A strange and stubborn endurance. The words might have been a prophecy, for they never ceased to be relevant: not in my childhood, and certainly not to my adult self.”
― Foz Meadows, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance

“he carried too the determined self-possession of a survivor; that almost indefinable capacity, not just to endure, but to recover.”
― Foz Meadows, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance