Baggott Quotes & Sayings

But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing. — Julianna Baggott

Even if their supplies of love are finite, they've figured out that life is, too, and they're no longer rationing. — Julianna Baggott

The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work. — Julianna Baggott

[She] knows that it's fear that keeps her love in check. but what if falling in love i a sign not of weakness but of courage? what if it isnt falling or crashing but taking a leap? — Julianna Baggott

Sometimes you meet someone and you know that your life will be different from then on. — Julianna Baggott

The intricacy of plotting a thriller is akin to writing formal poetry. — Julianna Baggott

Once upon a time, privacy was valued. For goodness' sake, a disabled president of the United States could ask that the press not photograph him in a wheelchair or being transferred to his car or generally in a weakened state, and the press would oblige. Those were the days. — Julianna Baggott

Even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed. — Julianna Baggott

Sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I'll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page - in relation to each other - are cocooned against my own feelings about what I'm writing until they're loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done. — Julianna Baggott

Just remember that money cannot buy you happiness (although it might make misery more tolerable). — Jim Baggott

I believe we're brutes, but then, miraculously, there are those among us who stand up against that brutishness and remind us of the goodness we're capable of. — Julianna Baggott

Beauty, you can find it here if you look hard enough. — Julianna Baggott

Basically if you burst into my office the walls themselves will flutter as if alive - maybe that's the reason for all the wings in 'Pure.' — Julianna Baggott

I am politically pro-choice, but personally pro-life. I have my faith but refuse to force it on the world at large - especially this world, so brutal and unjust. I cannot make these wrenching personal life and death decisions for others - nor do I believe they should be made by a church run by childless men. — Julianna Baggott

The truth that writers secretly harbor is that all books are failures. We try to do something that can't be done. Words. Is that all we rely on? Smudgy ink marks on a page? Pallid wisps and blotches? Text as scaffolding trying to hold up worlds? Actually, no, it's not all we rely on. What's worse is our reliance on the reader. A writer is forever locked in an interdependent relationship. It's like building a bridge from opposite sides of a river - our flimsy words and their frail, overreaching imaginations. The bridge will never meet in the middle. It's not possible. Sometimes you haven't even decided on the same river. The Gateway Arch in Saint Louis missed in the middle by a matter of inches the first time around. They tried again and made it. Writers know we never will. — Julianna Baggott

People never outgrow wanting to be liked for being who they truly are, especially when they've grown up in the limelight or its shadowy edge. — Julianna Baggott

I don't know when I'm writing dark. I don't know when I'm writing funny or even heartbreaking. I'm always just trying to write it true. — Julianna Baggott

Sometimes your secrets are your only value. — Julianna Baggott

I didn't know it until the end. All stories worth telling are love stories. — Julianna Baggott

Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor. — Julianna Baggott

Love is selfless, it is a weakness, a giving in, a constant falling. — Julianna Baggott

Our stories are what we are. Our stories preserve us. We give them to one another. Our stories have value — Julianna Baggott

She feels sick. She hates this world. — Julianna Baggott

We each have a story. They did this to us. There was no outside aggressor. They wanted an Apocalypse. They wanted the end. And they made it happen. It was orchestrated - who got in, who didn't. There was a master list. We weren't on it. We were left here to die. They want to erase us, the past, but we can't let them. — Julianna Baggott

I am deeply Catholic and always will be, but I'm no longer a member of the church. I left in 2003 because of the sex abuse scandal. — Julianna Baggott

Memories are like water. — Julianna Baggott

She started telling Lyda stories, odd nameless placeless stories, about the man and the woman, myths or memories, perhaps from her own childhood. — Julianna Baggott

To know someone, to be known. That matters more than he'd ever thought it would. — Julianna Baggott

When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher. — Julianna Baggott

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it. — Julianna Baggott

Here, falling in love can be an event, a proclamation without acknowledging that everyone you love could die an awful death, that loving someone is an acceptance of impending loss. — Julianna Baggott

Are you saying that the people here aren't desperate? I think you're wrong. I think they are and they just don't know it.
Oh, they're desperate, all right, but so desperate that they're clinging to what they have. — Julianna Baggott

The ugliness is what makes the beautiful things beautiful. — Julianna Baggott

Scars are good. Right, Helmud? It's the body's way of making armour. — Julianna Baggott

Don't shame the young for releasing their pent-up fear. — Julianna Baggott

The fact is there are many women who nod politely, even agree openly within their male-dominated often highly educated cultures, but vote their own minds. — Julianna Baggott

She glances back before stepping into the alley, and she catches her grandfather looking at her the way he does sometimes
as if she's already gone, as if he's practicing sorrow. — Julianna Baggott

Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should. — Julianna Baggott

When boys grow into men, their boyishness is still apparent each time they abandon themselves a little. I stretch against them sometimes
lovesickness, it is the same ache as homesickness for me
and I marvel. The length of their bodies, it's where I find my house, my old street, Ashbury Park and all of its yowling
men, they walk around carrying my country, my motherland, and they don't even know. They don't have the tiniest idea. — Julianna Baggott

She let him go once. Every day demands that she release him over and over again. — Julianna Baggott

Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart. — Richard Russo

Finally, and most importantly, we must be concerned about the implications of multiverse theories for the future development of science itself. The multiverse theorists know that they are on weak ground regarding the Testability Principle, and rather than admit that their theories are not science, they argue instead that the rules of science must be adapted to accommodate this kind of metaphysical speculation. They want to change the very definition of science. This is a very slippery slope. — Jim Baggott

I always doubt people ... I've survived by not believing in other human beings. — Julianna Baggott

I have faith in human beings. I struggle with that faith. — Julianna Baggott

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life. — Julianna Baggott

I miss art. I miss art. Life would be worth living if I had art. — Julianna Baggott

The truth is that for those 86 long years when the Red Sox went without a World Series win, fans were not only in a recession, but trapped in a longstanding, deeply entrenched sports depression. — Julianna Baggott

If men are paid/praised more than women for the same work than it always pays to allow the man to have more freedom to pour himself into his work - think of athletes, actors over the age of 28, lawyers, accountants, college deans ... — Julianna Baggott

Our stories are what we have," Our Good Mother says. "Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand? — Julianna Baggott

The poem has to bear the weight with image, language ... the screenplay with dialogue, plot ... — Julianna Baggott

My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story. — Julianna Baggott

Sometimes the only way to fix a mistake- is to make it twice. — Julianna Baggott

She knows that whispers can be useful. Sometimes they contain real information. But usually they're fairy tales and lies. This is the worst kind of whisper, the kind that draws you in, gives you hope. — Julianna Baggott

I've never thought there was anything I could hope to get by praying for it. — Julianna Baggott

His wings - she's never seen them fully spread, massive and strong. She wants to tell him that this is how he was meant to be - as wrong as it was for her to do this to him, as wrong as it feels, he is this person in this moment, and there's nothing more beautiful. — Julianna Baggott

I feel too much. It's like being drummed to death from within. You know? — Julianna Baggott

And I knew that I loved him with more than a nod. I loved him with a rush of tenderness, a lion's share. (Is that ever enough?)
I wanted to survive. I had to. I never called. — Julianna Baggott

I'm about to start something new. I'm waiting to be whelmed. The whelming as you start something new is quite something. — Julianna Baggott

I believe that one of the most damning things about our culture is the adage to never talk religion and politics. Because we don't model this discourse at the dinner table and at Thanksgiving, we don't know how to do it well and we're not teaching our children about the world and about how to discuss it. — Julianna Baggott

Revolutions are usually started by people who are hungry. Sure, there are ideological revolutions, but, again, people rise up because they feel that the alternative is no longer livable. They have to be desperate. — Julianna Baggott

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one. — Julianna Baggott

I've either been in love a dozen times or never. I can't tell. — Julianna Baggott

Our love is our burden. — Julianna Baggott

Each genre has something to teach me about the others. Not all the lessons are transferable, but many of the most important ones are. — Julianna Baggott

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately. — Julianna Baggott

When I first met you, I thought we were made for each other even though we seemed like opposites in some ways and we fought. But now ... "
"What?"
"Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other - into the people we should become. Do you know what I mean? — Julianna Baggott

I write across genres so I see them, more often, as complementary instead of separated by boundaries. — Julianna Baggott

Approach the world with sympathy and compassion, just don't take any of it very seriously. — Kate Baggott

The box we stored God i kept getting smaller ... until only a speck of god still exists, maybe only an atom.
Maybe an atom is all we need. — Julianna Baggott

Women are constantly underestimated in our power, our reach, our collective pull. — Julianna Baggott

One of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling - even fleetingly - that I'm not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself. — Julianna Baggott

Don't talk about dying? You want me to talk about love. They're one and the same, child. One and the same. — Julianna Baggott

She doesn't want his sympathy. She hates pity. — Julianna Baggott

Are there books about us or something? This makes Pressia angry - the idea that this world is a subject of study, a story, instead of filled with real people, trying to survive. — Julianna Baggott

But she's still afraid that the more she misses him
his face, his skin, the way he looked at her
and the more hope she has that she'll see him again, the more she has to lose. — Julianna Baggott

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use. — Julianna Baggott

I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it. — Julianna Baggott

Genres are just bottles for the various boats. The boats matter to me. — Julianna Baggott

My oldest sister was an actress living in NYC by the time I was ten, and desperately wanted to be the one in charge of the words. — Julianna Baggott

I'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination. — Julianna Baggott

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.' — Julianna Baggott

My childhood was marked by the great fear of nuclear holocaust. We practiced our Civil Defense Drills, lining up in hallways, curled to the floor, but we knew we'd die or, worse, survive only to suffer radiation and slow death. — Julianna Baggott

I'm a woman, but I've been a sexist, too. — Julianna Baggott

When you're in the world looking for only one thing, you find it or it finds you. The obsession can be mutual — Julianna Baggott

The dirt," he says, his voice strangely peaceful. "What about it?" she asks. "It's dirty. — Julianna Baggott

Finally she said, "When I grow up, I'm going to live out here. I'll probably be a Miss Somebody, too ... "
Don't grow up," I told her. "It only gets more confusing. — Julianna Baggott

For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course. instead of truth and comprehension, we got deeply unsettling questions about what we can ever hope to know about the world. — Jim Baggott

It was the brightest entry into darkness. — Julianna Baggott

It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer. — Julianna Baggott

She feels a great pang of loss, an unexpected welling of sorrow mixed with confusion. — Julianna Baggott

The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady. — Julianna Baggott

I prefer true over happy now. — Julianna Baggott

I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives. — Julianna Baggott

If home isn't a place, what is it?'

'A feeling. — Julianna Baggott

Maybe they just didn't have anywhere they needed to go. — Julianna Baggott

For the first time in as long as he can remember, El Capitan is proud of his brother. Damn it, Helmud! Shit! You've been planning to kill me! — Julianna Baggott

Being cross-genre, you can encounter an image and decide not only how to best express it but what form would express it best. — Julianna Baggott

But this kind of love can't survive. Love's a luxury. — Julianna Baggott

Writing across genres has made me more prolific. When one is fighting me or simply not cutting it, I turn to another. — Julianna Baggott

Omission is a sin only if, in the process of deceiving, you forget the truth. Lying is a sin only if, in the process, the lie becomes the only truth. — Julianna Baggott