Julia Glass
Novelist
1956-03-23
Quotes by Julia Glass
-
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.
Read quote -
To love me, my family does not need to understand me.
Read quote -
The older Kit gets, the less confident he feels judging other people as spouses or parents. These days, driving past the home of the Naked Hemp Society, he finds himself more curious than contemptuous about their easily ridiculed New Age ways. Why shouldn't they nurse their babies till age four? Why shouldn't they want to keep their children away from factory-farmed meats, from clothing soaked in fire-retardant chemicals, from dull-witted burned-out public school teachers whose tenure is all too easily approved? Why not frolic naked in the sprinkler---under the full moon, perhaps? Why not turn one's family into a small nurturing country protected by a virtual moat?
Read quote -
Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important?
Read quote -
Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.
Read quote -
But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greenie, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps they were like recipes, he pondered now, and the key to success was in finding the ingredients you had to remove, the components that turned all the others bitter, excessively salty, difficult to swallow; even too jarringly sweet. He had seen Greenie clarify butter, wash rice, devein shrimp, and meticulously snip the talons from artichoke leaves.
Read quote -
Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.
Read quote -
But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greenie, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps they were like recipes, he pondered now, and the key to success was in finding the ingredients you had to remove, the components that turned all the others bitter, excessively salty, difficult to swallow; even too jarringly sweet. He had seen Greenie clarify butter, wash rice, devein shrimp, and meticulously snip the talons from artichoke leaves.
Read quote -
To love me, my family does not need to understand me.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
The older Kit gets, the less confident he feels judging other people as spouses or parents. These days, driving past the home of the Naked Hemp Society, he finds himself more curious than contemptuous about their easily ridiculed New Age ways. Why shouldn't they nurse their babies till age four? Why shouldn't they want to keep their children away from factory-farmed meats, from clothing soaked in fire-retardant chemicals, from dull-witted burned-out public school teachers whose tenure is all too easily approved? Why not frolic naked in the sprinkler---under the full moon, perhaps? Why not turn one's family into a small nurturing country protected by a virtual moat?
Read quote -
Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important?
Read quote -
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.'
Read quote -
Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers.
Read quote -
Chemotherapy can be a long, tough haul - for me, it went on for six months - and the best doctors and nurses become, if only for that period of time, as essential in your life as friends or spouses.
Read quote -
All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces.
Read quote -
From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
I love to eat, I love to feed people, and I'm a great cook. I joked with my friends that I wanted to write a book where desserts had to be extensively researched, since I have a terrible sweet tooth. My particular downfall is cake.
Read quote -
My love of books - not just of their tactile pleasures but of their astonishing variety - was born in a book-filled house; my father is a scholar.
Read quote