119 Quotes by Julia Glass

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.

Happiness doesn’t come easily, just because you want or even deserve it,” she said. “I don’t think you’re too young to know that. So you’ve got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in, like capturing a bird.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’d suffocate. From my own cowardice.

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.