Quotes from Julia Glass

Sometimes the writing leads to the revelations, not the other way around.

I don't see how you can write well if you're not reading well at the same time. I think the only risk is reading too many books of one 'type' in a row.

Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language.

Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation.

I talked late, swam late, did not learn to ride a bike until college - and might never have walked or learned to drive a car if my parents hadn't overruled my lack of motivation and virtually forced me to embrace both forms of transportation. I suspect I was happy to sit in a corner with a book.

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.

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

Ira felt as if he'd contracted an all-over emotional itch, as if he'd put on a sweater made of spiritually abrasive wool- but to take it off would leave him dreadfully cold.

Clever how the cosmos can, in a single portent, be ingratiating yet sadistic.

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.

we're all alive the day before we die ... but, how alive is another question.

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.

Before heading back up the road, she had turned for a moment toward the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water was gray wrinkled with orange. Tiger water, she called it when it looked like that. Rhino water was smooth and leaden, dull as smoke. But her favorite was polar bear water, when the moon hung low and large, as if too heavy to rise very high, and scattered great radiant patches, like ice floes, across a dark blue ocean.

She loved the dogs as you're supposed to love dogs: consistently

Saints are merely tyrants in the kingdom of virtue.

Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.

I did not wonder if what his absence would spare me was the exhaustion of a longing so relentless it had become nearly unconscious, as if I had failed to realize that the water I drank was salty, always salty.

We do not demonstrate against anything. Our group is about being for something, never against. No antis except on my family tree.

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.

Do you think too long a period of nightlessness," mused Sandra, "could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can?

Happiness doesn't come easily, just because you want or even deserve it, she said. I don't think you're too young to know that. So you've got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in, like capturing a bird.

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.

Hugo planned a five-course meal: smoked duck, oyster stew, roast beef with mashed yams, a salad of apples with beets and blue cheese, then chocolate banana cream pie. Rich, rich, and richer still. Ben made pitchers of martinis and set aside thirty-five bottles of a tried-and-true Napa cabernet, pure purple velvet, and an Oregonian pinot gris, grassy and effervescent.

We're all alive the day before we die.