Quotes from Julia Glass

Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.

Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.

Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important?

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.

Ever noticed how sisters, when they aren't best friends, make particularly vicious enemies? -I See You Everywhere

Rage cools fast without an accessible target.

When it comes to love, dogs make pretty steep competition for us people. And rightly so.

The past is like the night: dark but sacred. It's the time when most of us sleep, so we think of the day as the time we really live, the only time that matters, because the stuff we do by day somehow makes us who we are. We feel the same way about the present. We say, let bygones be bygones... Water under the bridge. But there is no day without night, no wakefulness without sleep, no present without past. They are constantly somersaulting over each other.

Always more to learn, that's the pain and the pleasure

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.

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.

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.

I'd suffocate. From my own cowardice.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Knowing and understanding the people we love most is a process that continues well beyond their deaths... and is never complete.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

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.

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.

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.'

The best booksellers are like trustworthy pushers: Whatever they're dealing, you take it.