Julia Glass

“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.”

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

“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, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.”

“There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, the currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.”

“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.”

“Well, yes, there were quite a lot of books throughout, tumbling out of haphazardly placed bookshelves, stacked beneath chairs, beside beds, even in the bottoms of a closet or two. But I was never a "collector." 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!--but they should not inspire fetishistic devotion.”

“When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.”

“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.”

“Mind who you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved.”

“Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.”

“Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love or into thinking that you are.”

“People take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that.”

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

“Rage cools fast without an accessible target.”

“Most inexperienced cooks believe, mistakenly, that a fine cake is less challenging to produce than a fine souffle or mousse. I know, however, that a good cake is like a good marriage: from the outside, it looks ordinary, sometimes unremarkable, yet cut into it, taste it, and you know that it is nothing of the sort. It is the sublime result oflong and patient experience, a confection whose success relies on a profound understanding of compatibilities and tastes; on a respect for measurement, balance, chemistry and heat; on a history of countless errors overcome.”

“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.”

“When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.”

“All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.”