Julia Claiborne Johnson Quotes

#1. but I've found the best way to handle anyone difficult - rich worrywart moms, the famished Manhattan vegan ordering a late lunch - is to exude the bland calm of the heavily medicated and go about my business.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#2. With children in the house, you're on call around the clock whether you like it or not. You don't get the luxury of enough sleep when that was what you needed most to keep yourself from going over the edge.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#3. I go to sleep exhausted," she said. "I wake up tired." Yes.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#4. From that high up, language or the lack of it didn't matter much. The swirling currents of people were way better than anything on TV. Even on cable. Except, possibly, the Armenian Channel.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#5. Youth isn't wasted on the young, literature is.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#6. Frank will be okay, Alice," Mr. Vargas said. "He's an odd duck, but brilliant children often are. I make myself out to be," he said. "I'm worried, yes. But I'd worry more if she didn't have Frank. She's all he got, and she knows it.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#7. My mother always said that the best way to connect with anybody who was a mother was to find a way to compliment her child.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#8. Sometimes just explaining your predicament--to a bartender, a priest, the old woman in a shift and flip-flops cleaning the lint traps in the Laundromat dryers--is all it takes to see a way out of it.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#9. Later, Xander said, "It's not about you, you know. What Mimi hates is how her life has turned out. It isn't how she thought it would be back when she was your age and on the top of the world.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#10. If you think you'll always let people down, that's all you'll ever do, I said.

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#11. Energy spent on worrying about a future you can't control is energy wasted. It doesn't do anybody one bit of good. I

Julia Claiborne Johnson

#12. They're probably mad because you're smart and make good grades. Kids are stupid like that. The teachers love you, though, right?"
"I'll tell you what my mom says teachers don't love," said Frank. "Being corrected.

Julia Claiborne Johnson