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Quote by Julia Glass

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The Widower's Tale

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Author

Julia Glass
Julia Glass

Julia Glass is a renowned American novelist born on March 23, 1956. Her works are known for their profound character development and unique narrative style, which have won her a wide audience. more

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“Eunan was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements… He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. 'Get away out of that!' he'd shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever. To him harsh words weren't a bad thing, they were just a little sandpaper, giving a person a hard-wearing exterior. 'I was often spoken to harshly and it's done me no harm, he'd say and no one dared disagree.”

“Here's the crazy thing about light. It can be flat and dull, casting nothing into shadow and throwing little into relief. Everything is illuminated exactly the same; nothing to entice or call you forward. Any photographer knows that you can take a million technically perfect photos in light like that—perfect but lacking magic. But all it takes is one tiny, almost imperceptible shift, and suddenly everything dances and turns into prisms of color and lines that beckon and move and sing. You don’t have to travel an inch. No doing or undoing. Just the slightest shift (of position, of perspective, of power) and everything is transformed. Light like that asks us to remember that it’s all magic, one way or another, isn’t it? We just have to be willing to spin until we catch it, hold it as long as it wishes to be held, and then release and watch it dance away. And then we shift and shift and shift again. We can’t hold anything, not really, only learn to dance with it while it is ours to have and know. But there is one thing I know in this life, I’ll never stop chasing the shift. I’ll never stop looking for new ways to see. I’ll never stop seeking the light.”

“When you were living in the moment though, it wasn’t possible to truly understand how finite it all was. Don’t we all secretly hope that we are the exception to the rules of time? We might even be immortal. Then, one day, something happens, you see your aging reflection in the mirror, really see it, and you know you’ve been fooling yourself. You can’t go back and relive it again and remembering can be a beautiful thing, but it can also break your heart.”

“All beings experience hunger, that persistent reminder of mortality. The blooming hollow inside all, which affirms that only by taking from without and devouring within can we extend our coil. Hunger is universal for those who are destined to die. As they feed, they pay the incremental bribes that forestall its coming.”