Quotes from Julia Glass

There were times when he wanted to tell Greenie, outright, that her mother was not the generous, loving woman Greenie presumed her to be, but he knew better. Maybe some fortunate children were born with platinum emotional shields, protecting them from harm and keeping them, also harmlessly, oblivious.

On Thursday, the sandwiches Greenie made were pork tenderloins with chipotle mustard, the soup a puree of beets and pears with Beaujolais wine and dill. For dessert, she made lemon wafers, rosewater marshmallows, and Amazon cake powdered with cocoa. Ray said, eyeing her preparations that morning. Fancy schmancy. That soup looks like something we'd serve to folks from the White House. Greenie said simply, Thank you.

Bet you did not know that in Mexico they call a Palomino an Isabella. Or that George Washington's warhorse was an Arab named Magnolia. I sure as hell did not. Hey, Magnolia! Takes a mighty secure man to ride a horse into battle with a name like that; well, to ride a horse into battle at all.

Greenie had brought together ingredients for cherry bread. It was a variation on Irish soda bread, baked in a cast-iron skillet with dried cherries and pepitas instead of raisins and caraway seeds. At lunch, she would serve it with a spinach gorgonzola salad (the dressing sweet, to appease Ray) and a veal roast studded, porcupine fashion, with long, thin slivers of garlic, ginger, and chili pepper.

Sometimes I have this feeling," Walter said, "that he operates on the philosophy that 'what Walter doesn't know won't hurt him.

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.

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.

Carrying a plate on which she'd placed a sandwich made with burlap bread, she looked over my shoulder.

Some might have referred to Vince, Buck and Calvin as ordinary fellows or salt of the earth. Such terms are merely code for men who've led lives in which boyhood dreams become a luxury, a whim, before boyhood even comes to an end.

At least pretend we have a standing date, someday, for that mother-son field trip we never got to take, thanks to Sam's draconian call sheets. He should've stayed on to run Italy itself. They'd be a superpower!

the monotony of quiet creativity, imagination fueled by routine and isolation

She hadn't bothered to go to bed, since Tuesday was one of the days on which she rose before dawn to bake brioche, scones, cinnamon rolls, and- Tuesdays only- a coffee cake rich with cardamom, orange zest, and grated gingerroot: a cunningly savory sweet that left her work kitchen smelling like a fine Indian restaurant, a brief invigorating change from the happily married scents of butter, vanilla, and sugar (the fragrance, to Greenie, of ordinary life).

My love of books is a love of what they contain; they hold knowledge as a pitcher holds water, as a dress contains the mystery of a woman's exquisite body. Their physicality matters—do not speak to me of storing books as bytes!

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.

The peak of a mountain, he says, is always a perilous place to stand, no matter how sweeping the view.

Once the world at large— or the media, to be more accurate— beatifies you, life is never the same. And because you cannot resist the stoking of your ego, no matter how hard you try, you begin to lose sight of yourself as just another workaday sinner.

So there was a martini- something he hadn't tasted since college- and there was wine, and there was a dinner most remarkable for a meal produced at a camp: smoked mussels (gathered and smoked right there on the island, he learned), ratatouille, a salad with pears and blue cheese, and a three-layer chocolate cake with whipped cream and cherries, all of it made by Greenie's mother, who would not accept a bit of help.

responsible for their triumphs as well as their failures. She also told him, as if it were a well-known law of nature, like gravity or centripetal force, that creative thinking blossomed in what others might see as idleness.

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.

feel as if I'm visiting home in a dream, where everything yet nothing is the way it should be, where the best of what you have and what you wish for are briefly, tantalizingly united. Tealing

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.

If a mother somehow thinks she deserves to know everything, then she will have to know things that keep her up at night, won't she?

He pictured her living alone in that tranquil house with its fine old furnishings, tending her flowers and fruit trees.

No one belongs to us, and we belong to no one - not in that sense. This should free us, but it never quite does.