Quotes from Julie Schumacher

Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?

Boredom is why God invented books.

A drowning person doesn't rescue herself.

My mother says that some books are good no matter when you read them, and some are good at a particular moment; they come into your life at just the right time.

I love to sleep. My astrological sign is the sloth.

There is something absent in me, I thought. Something incomplete. Even my mother couldn't describe me. There was something empty in me that in other people was full.

The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

Any person who is carrying a lot of sadness needs to be able to rest sometimes, and to put it down.

and we both know how beautiful the book will be, how clearly it will speak to something within us—some previously unarticulated thought or reflection that, once recognized, we will never want to be without again.

I haven't published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss. On multiple occasions, serving on awards committees, I was actually required to write LORs to myself.

Maybe the things she loved most weren't meant to be permanent. Maybe the fact that they existed was enough.

And as if she had opened a hidden door, I felt the patterned surface break and give way, and the words let me in. I still loved opening a book and feeling like I was physically entering the page, the ordinary world fizzing and blurring around the edges until it disappeared.

To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people - and now I was expected to pronounce a judgement about its worth?

but an idea had presented itself to him, knocking at his brain like a nighttime traveler, and instead of shutting the door in its face, Browles built it a fire, he drew a chair for it up to the hearth and spent half a decade trying to decipher and then convey what it struggled to tell him. He was patient and industrious and quietly determined. Buffeted by setbacks and rejection and his own limitations, he persevered.

I had just wanted to be part of a story; I wanted to be a person who had a story to tell.

But there are other faculty here on campus who are not disposed to see notable scholarship ignored; and let it be known that, in the darkened, blood-strewn caverns of our offices, we are hewing our textbooks and keyboards into spears.

The poor misguided soul described me as generous, "a champion for the department and particularly its students"; he went on to say that my disagreeable nature was "at least 50 percent façade" and that "Fitger behaves like more of an ass than he actually is." Janet described these comments as persuasive praise.

Thanks to Lawrence Jacobs, world's most enthusiastic and supportive spouse, who read the first draft of this book and said, "I'm glad we have different last names.

In the meantime, I hope you will not consign her to a windowless environment populated entirely by unsocialized clones who long ago abandoned the reading and discussion of literature in favor of creating ever more restrictive and meaningless ways in which humans are intended to make themselves known to one another.

We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon

sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet's surface;

Believing in books is a lot like believing in God.

The intriguing thing about playing Scrabble is that as soon as the board is set up in front of me, I don't know any words. Other than cat and bat and rat, everything disappears from the language drawer in my brain. My mother, on the other hand, who normally speaks English like a regular person, spells things like qiviut (wool of the muskox) and hake.

Are you going to redye it? No. My mother hates it, so I'm going to keep it, I said.