Julie G > Recent Status Updates

Here's my message today to Elizabeth Strout: My dear, you are a FIERCE, ferocious, badass writer. You make me lightheaded.

In her mind, she was a faint pencil line on a piece of paper; everyone else was drawn in ink, some--like the minister--with a firm Magic Marker.

My father, who had dared to talk back to the Taliban, was learning that sometimes saying nothing speaks just as loudly.

"Don't cry," my mother had said. "Pray."

When you've nearly lost your life, a funny face in the mirror is simply proof that you are still here on this earth.

Kids wanted fathers to have answers.

The morning light's radiance showed in the sharp, clear blue of the sky, in the twinkling of a fender of a car that passed by, in the open-handed beauty of the leaves moving in the tall maples along this section of the town's Main Street.

There was Tom, whistling like a tree-full of birds.

No one could measure up to her expectations; no one would care to try.

Disappointment was now built into any hope she might have had left.

Some powerful force had come to dwell inside me, something bigger and stronger than me, and it had made me fearless.

"At night our fear is strong. . . but in the morning, in the light, we find our courage again."

I asked God for the strength and courage to make the world a better place.

It was no longer a question of whether she should or should not do such and such a thing but of whether she would or would not.

Without her looks she felt her personality deteriorate.

While he sat there he let his anger mount and felt it was doing him a power of good. Anger would liberate him from servility, would make him lose his scruples. Anger, he almost believed, would enable him to have his own way.

Without love there can be no reason for hope.

There seemed to be no end to the amount of bad news he could absorb.

Most things cost her a great effort.

"Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill."

It wasn't easy to trust love or any of its artifacts.

How impossible marriage was; it had to be a matter of sadomasochism or just plain lethargy when it lasted.

Memory is a benevolent editor.

"I do really wish to destroy it!" cried Frodo. "Or, well, to have it destroyed. I am not made for perilous quests. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?"
"Such questions cannot be answered," said Gandalf. . . "But you have been chosen and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have."

"Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again."
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times."

Everyone seems to have one parent whose approval we crave our entire lives and never fully receive.

What happens to all that lost desire, all the language we never use?

"London's not so bad. It has a certain gloomy charm when you get used to it."

I felt emptied-out and peaceful, like when you've had a toothache and it stops for a bit, and you know quite well it's going to start again but just for a bit it's stopped.

Who said, "Oh Lord, let me see? I would rather say, "Oh Lord, keep me blind."

"She liked witty people; she forgave them anything."