Julia Glass Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Julia Glass.
Famous Quotes By Julia Glass
The best booksellers are like trustworthy pushers: Whatever they're dealing, you take it. — Julia Glass
Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance. — Julia Glass
Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens
but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls. — Julia Glass
Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers. — Julia Glass
The old adage is, 'Write what you know.' But if you only do that, your work becomes claustrophobic. I say, 'Write what you want to know.' — Julia Glass
I read reviews and consider myself pretty 'plugged in' to the literary cosmos, yet one of the things I love best about book-touring is the opportunity to compare notes with favorite booksellers around the country. I always come home with books by authors I'd never heard of - or books I've read about but didn't realize I might love. — Julia Glass
Behold the rich farm boy Malachy Burns
Who plays his pipe among the churns.
He's a coward, he's benighted,
He makes everyone feel slighted,
And all things but music he spurns. — Julia Glass
People take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. — Julia Glass
I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote
first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on. — Julia Glass
But boys who like the tough sports - boys who are virtually nursed on that potion of hustle, slam, and grunt - they're the ones with the best chance in life. — Julia Glass
Winter sports aren't my thing. You can have your boards and blades and your glacier-gripping cleats: My feet prefer to negotiate the ground on a pair of dependable soles. — 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
A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art. — Julia Glass
Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt. — Julia Glass
Colorful garments - ball gowns, kimonos, evening pajamas - made from yards upon yards of iridescent silk or velvet. I own an unjustifiable number of such outfits and jump at the chance to wear them. Against the etiquette about which I am otherwise all too conscious, I frequently, and unrepentantly, overdress for the occasion. — Julia Glass
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
Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do. — Julia Glass
Ever noticed how sisters, when they aren't best friends, make particularly vicious enemies?
-I See You Everywhere — Julia Glass
My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon. — Julia Glass
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
But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves. — Julia Glass
I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about ... the world I live in. — Julia Glass
Saints are merely tyrants in the kingdom of virtue. — Julia Glass
As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real. — Julia Glass
To love me, my family does not need to understand me. — Julia Glass
I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way. — Julia Glass
Elizabeth Spencer. — Julia Glass
When the girls were small, I heard Poppy tell one of her friends, "I don't see how you could ever have a favorite when there are just two: one will always and forever be your first, the miracle baby, the one who paves the way, strikes out for adventure - the intrepid one, the one who teaches you how to do what nature intended all along - and the other, oh the other will always be your baby, your darling, the one you surprised yourself by loving just as desperately much as you loved the first." Pursuant — Julia Glass
To have children is to plant roses, muguets, lavender, lilac, gardenia, stock, peonies, tuberose, hyacinth ... it is to achieve a whole sense,a grand sense one did not priorly know. It is to give one's garden another dimension. Perfume of life itself. — Julia Glass
I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel. — Julia Glass
Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation. — Julia Glass
She loved the dogs as you're supposed to love dogs: consistently — Julia Glass
I love to eat, I love to feed people, and I'm a great cook. I joked with my friends that I wanted to write a book where desserts had to be extensively researched, since I have a terrible sweet tooth. My particular downfall is cake. — Julia Glass
I grew up in a home where animals were ever-present and often dominated our lives. There were always horses, dogs, and cats, as well as a revolving infirmary of injured wildlife being nursed by my sister the aspiring vet. — Julia Glass
Rage cools fast without an accessible target. — Julia Glass
Over time, it's occurred to me that my protagonists all originate in some aspect of myself that I find myself questioning or feeling uncomfortable about. — Julia Glass
When it comes to love, dogs make pretty steep competition for us people. And rightly so. — Julia Glass
I have struggled for decades now with the fear of and resistance to change - mostly in the realms of technology, transportation, and the ways people choose to communicate. If I had a theme song, it would be that lovely song 'I'm Old-Fashioned,' as sung by Ella Fitzgerald. — Julia Glass
I continue to shun, in a very curmudgeonly fashion, things like Twitter and Facebook. — Julia Glass
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
Sometimes the writing leads to the revelations, not the other way around. — Julia Glass
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
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
Sometimes I have this feeling," Walter said, "that he operates on the philosophy that 'what Walter doesn't know won't hurt him. — Julia Glass
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
In my fairly disorganized life, yellow stickies are too easily lost, and as for software, I try to avoid using my computer as much more than a typewriter and a post office. I rely on my lifelong habit of daydreaming to spin my stories. — Julia Glass
A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, 'Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.' — Julia Glass
Though I'm a New Englander, I'm very indoorsy once the mercury drops. — Julia Glass
I guess that's how well you know me. You think I like hearing this news."
"I'm sorry. This is selfish. I just need to tell someone ... outside my life. Get it out of my
head, to keep from going nuts, but somewhere safe."
She sees me as safe? This brings tears to my eyes.
"I trust you, Clem. Are you pissed? — Julia Glass
That's why you can't be a true Yankee without winter: because all the best pleasures are earned - the fire, the fried oysters; the warmer seasons, too. Who knows the real worth of summer at the beach without a good taste of the seaside in winter? — Julia Glass
Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important? — Julia Glass
Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring. — Julia Glass
Do you think too long a period of nightlessness," mused Sandra, "could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can? — Julia Glass
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
I'd suffocate. From my own cowardice. — Julia Glass
Chemotherapy can be a long, tough haul - for me, it went on for six months - and the best doctors and nurses become, if only for that period of time, as essential in your life as friends or spouses. — Julia Glass
God, Lou. Don't you think I want you to have what you want?"
"You're my sister. You're supposed to want those things for me."
"You can't have it both ways, Lou. When things get bad, you can't call me - which I'm glad
about, I am! - you can't do that and then imply I don't give a shit about you."
"That's what I used to think. — Julia Glass
When it comes to love, there is the timeworn caution that the very qualities you fall hardest for may be those you grow to despise. With Stavros, she wonders if the opposite might hold true: that this quality she nearly fears - his aversion to sanctifying the past - is something for which she will someday be grateful. — Julia Glass
My love of books - not just of their tactile pleasures but of their astonishing variety - was born in a book-filled house; my father is a scholar. — Julia Glass
Clem is my first dead body. I've heard again and again - mostly from friends who've lost other friends to AIDS - that it's essential to see the corpse of someone you love, especially someone who's died undeservedly young; how it will confirm the way nothing else can that he or she is no longer here. The body won't look like the person you know, the self of that person, at all. This tells you there has to be a soul because something's missing; what else could that something be? The first thing I know, when I see her, isthat this is not a piece of advice I will ever pass on. — Julia Glass
To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism. — Julia Glass
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
Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write. — Julia Glass
Mind who you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved. — Julia Glass
Somewhat sadly, the survival of many bookstores now depends on selling merchandise other than books. — Julia Glass
I write because I'm in love with language; because I like working for myself, inside my head; and because it's the only way I know to make a stab at answering the never-ending questions of the heart that arise simply from the everyday living of our lives. — Julia Glass
Always more to learn, that's the pain and the pleasure — Julia Glass
My own life is wonderful, but if I had to live the life of someone else, I'd gladly choose that of Julia Child or Dr. Seuss: two outrageously original people, each of whom fashioned an idiosyncratic wisdom, passion for life, and sense of humor into an art form that anyone and everyone could savor. — Julia Glass
I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up! — Julia Glass
He pictured her living alone in that tranquil house with its fine old furnishings, tending her flowers and fruit trees. — Julia Glass
Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love or into thinking that you are. — Julia Glass
What, exactly, is a father if not a man who, once you're grown and gone and out in the world making your own mistakes, all good advice be damned, waits patiently for you to return? And if you don't, well then, you don't. He understands that risk. He knows whose choice it is. — Julia Glass
Finally, in my early 30s, I started writing fiction for the first time as an adult. That felt so scary, and I spent a few years feeling miserably 'behind' my high-achieving friends. But I persevered and obviously have no regrets. — Julia Glass
All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces. — Julia Glass
We're all alive the day before we die. — Julia Glass
In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams ... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding. — Julia Glass
Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language. — Julia Glass
In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate. — Julia Glass
Clever how the cosmos can, in a single portent, be ingratiating yet sadistic. — Julia Glass
My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible. — Julia Glass
The older Kit gets, the less confident he feels judging other people as spouses or parents. These days, driving past the home of the Naked Hemp Society, he finds himself more curious than contemptuous about their easily ridiculed New Age ways. Why shouldn't they nurse their babies till age four? Why shouldn't they want to keep their children away from factory-farmed meats, from clothing soaked in fire-retardant chemicals, from dull-witted burned-out public school teachers whose tenure is all too easily approved? Why not frolic naked in the sprinkler
under the full moon, perhaps? Why not turn one's family into a small nurturing country protected by a virtual moat? — Julia Glass
I am not opposed to e-readers. Any technology that encourages the reading of literature is a good thing. — Julia Glass
Everybody, will you please just sit for a minute?
Like children in a game of musical chairs, Tommy's three guests immediately reach for the nearest chair, pull it out from the table, and sit---even her brother. Well, says Tommy. Something in my life goes according to plan. — Julia Glass
It's this time of year when Kit mist rise in the dark, as if we're a farmer or a fisherman, someone whose livelihood depends on beating the dawn, convincing himself that what looks like night is actually morning. — Julia Glass
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
I was ridiculed in public school for being smart. A teacher's pet. — Julia Glass
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
Mind what you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved. As — Julia Glass
I once knew this cellist, Miss Browning,
A swan with whom I enjoyed clowning.
But at night when she bloomed
I felt blissfully doomed.
Far from shore, in danger of drowning. — Julia Glass
And then there's the personal question so many of Lassie's fans want to ask: Is he allowed on the furniture? Of course he is-but, then, he's the one who paid for it. — Julia Glass
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'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great. — Julia Glass
I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed. — Julia Glass
I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine. — Julia Glass
If I'm lucky enough to see the day when my sons are living independently, maybe with families of their own, I'll still be wondering how I can be a better mother and worrying about the things I overlooked back when they lived under my roof. — Julia Glass
All that spring and summer, there were times when she felt as if she had no joints or muscles, no physical means with which to move about the world. — Julia Glass
At its best, fiction cultivates fantasy and compassion; at its worst, memoir provokes schadenfreude and prurience. The ugly truth, I fear, is that many people are drawn to sensational memoirs for the same reason they watch 'The Apprentice': they like to witness actual suffering, before-your-very-eyes humiliation. — Julia Glass
There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters. — Julia Glass
The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark. — Julia Glass