Top 100 Julianna Baggott Quotes
#1. Writing across genres has made me more prolific. When one is fighting me or simply not cutting it, I turn to another.
Julianna Baggott
#2. I don't have a favorite. I need different genres at different times.
Julianna Baggott
#3. One of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling - even fleetingly - that I'm not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself.
Julianna Baggott
#4. If you look at the world one way, it takes from you - it's a thief of time, energy, creative mojo. But if you look at the world another way, it gives you an endless supply of motivation.
Julianna Baggott
#5. Writers aren't born properly labeled so it is hard to know one when one appears.
Julianna Baggott
#6. To know someone, to be known. That matters more than he'd ever thought it would.
Julianna Baggott
#7. Love is a luxury. It's something that people are allowed to indulge in when they're not simply trying to survive and keep other people alive.
Julianna Baggott
#8. I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.
Julianna Baggott
#10. Are you saying that the people here aren't desperate? I think you're wrong. I think they are and they just don't know it.
Oh, they're desperate, all right, but so desperate that they're clinging to what they have.
Julianna Baggott
#11. I am deeply Catholic and always will be, but I'm no longer a member of the church. I left in 2003 because of the sex abuse scandal.
Julianna Baggott
#13. Love is selfless, it is a weakness, a giving in, a constant falling.
Julianna Baggott
#15. If men are paid/praised more than women for the same work than it always pays to allow the man to have more freedom to pour himself into his work - think of athletes, actors over the age of 28, lawyers, accountants, college deans ...
Julianna Baggott
#16. Will you be my wife forever? Here and now and beyond all of this?
Julianna Baggott
#17. Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.
Julianna Baggott
#19. Women are constantly underestimated in our power, our reach, our collective pull.
Julianna Baggott
#20. Are there books about us or something? This makes Pressia angry - the idea that this world is a subject of study, a story, instead of filled with real people, trying to survive.
Julianna Baggott
#21. Once upon a time, privacy was valued. For goodness' sake, a disabled president of the United States could ask that the press not photograph him in a wheelchair or being transferred to his car or generally in a weakened state, and the press would oblige. Those were the days.
Julianna Baggott
#22. But she's still afraid that the more she misses him
his face, his skin, the way he looked at her
and the more hope she has that she'll see him again, the more she has to lose.
Julianna Baggott
#23. His wings - she's never seen them fully spread, massive and strong. She wants to tell him that this is how he was meant to be - as wrong as it was for her to do this to him, as wrong as it feels, he is this person in this moment, and there's nothing more beautiful.
Julianna Baggott
#24. Writers are socially observant. We find people endlessly fascinating, and real life is mysterious. Sometimes it's hard to stop staring at the strut and squawk of my fellow man. They can be quite inspiring. Sometimes it's hard to stop talking to them to see what in the world they're thinking.
Julianna Baggott
#25. And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books ... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.
Julianna Baggott
#26. People know the difference between good and evil in their hearts - if they search them. Religions twist good and evil. Their differences are the kind that need to be taught because they aren't natural.
Julianna Baggott
#29. I don't know when I'm writing dark. I don't know when I'm writing funny or even heartbreaking. I'm always just trying to write it true.
Julianna Baggott
#30. Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other
into the people we should become.
Julianna Baggott
#31. Our stories are what we have," Our Good Mother says. "Our stories preserve us. we give them to one another. Our stories have value. Do you understand?
Julianna Baggott
#33. Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should.
Julianna Baggott
#34. I want to keep looking at ways to stride forward with positivity.
Julianna Baggott
#35. Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.
Julianna Baggott
#36. I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.
Julianna Baggott
#37. If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.
Julianna Baggott
#38. Here, falling in love can be an event, a proclamation without acknowledging that everyone you love could die an awful death, that loving someone is an acceptance of impending loss.
Julianna Baggott
#39. Scars are good. Right, Helmud? It's the body's way of making armour.
Julianna Baggott
#40. The ugliness is what makes the beautiful things beautiful.
Julianna Baggott
#41. My oldest sister was an actress living in NYC by the time I was ten, and desperately wanted to be the one in charge of the words.
Julianna Baggott
#42. I've either been in love a dozen times or never. I can't tell.
Julianna Baggott
#43. Basically if you burst into my office the walls themselves will flutter as if alive - maybe that's the reason for all the wings in 'Pure.'
Julianna Baggott
#44. The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.
Julianna Baggott
#46. I miss art. I miss art. Life would be worth living if I had art.
Julianna Baggott
#47. Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor.
Julianna Baggott
#49. She glances back before stepping into the alley, and she catches her grandfather looking at her the way he does sometimes
as if she's already gone, as if he's practicing sorrow.
Julianna Baggott
#50. I didn't start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself.
Julianna Baggott
#51. And I knew that I loved him with more than a nod. I loved him with a rush of tenderness, a lion's share. (Is that ever enough?)
I wanted to survive. I had to. I never called.
Julianna Baggott
#52. No matter what losses happen in a given season, the Red Sox always have next year.
Julianna Baggott
#53. When you're in the world looking for only one thing, you find it or it finds you. The obsession can be mutual
Julianna Baggott
#54. The intricacy of plotting a thriller is akin to writing formal poetry.
Julianna Baggott
#55. While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.
Julianna Baggott
#56. Our imaginations are strong as children. Sometimes they get shoved aside, these imaginations. They get dusty and mildewed with age. The imagination is a muscle that has to be put to use or it shrivels.
Julianna Baggott
#57. My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.
Julianna Baggott
#58. Genres are just bottles for the various boats. The boats matter to me.
Julianna Baggott
#59. But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Julianna Baggott
#60. Father can be the person you most hate and most fear, yes, but deep down you expect that he'll be the one to save you.
Julianna Baggott
#61. The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work.
Julianna Baggott
#63. She started telling Lyda stories, odd nameless placeless stories, about the man and the woman, myths or memories, perhaps from her own childhood.
Julianna Baggott
#64. When I met you, I thought we were meant for each other, even though, in some ways, seemed very different and we kept fighting. But now ... "
"What?"
"Now I think we're meant for each other, but we are doing to each other, to become the people we become. You know what I mean.
Julianna Baggott
#65. The fact is there are many women who nod politely, even agree openly within their male-dominated often highly educated cultures, but vote their own minds.
Julianna Baggott
#67. For the first time in as long as he can remember, El Capitan is proud of his brother. Damn it, Helmud! Shit! You've been planning to kill me!
Julianna Baggott
#68. Sometimes you meet someone and you know that your life will be different from then on.
Julianna Baggott
#69. Revolutions are usually started by people who are hungry. Sure, there are ideological revolutions, but, again, people rise up because they feel that the alternative is no longer livable. They have to be desperate.
Julianna Baggott
#71. Different genres allow me to not feel so hemmed in by my own voice, tics, style.
Julianna Baggott
#72. Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.
Julianna Baggott
#73. Red Sox fans have been pushed to the brink over the years, but that's how faith grows stronger.
Julianna Baggott
#74. I'm about to start something new. I'm waiting to be whelmed. The whelming as you start something new is quite something.
Julianna Baggott
#75. Being cross-genre, you can encounter an image and decide not only how to best express it but what form would express it best.
Julianna Baggott
#76. Each genre has something to teach me about the others. Not all the lessons are transferable, but many of the most important ones are.
Julianna Baggott
#77. Sometimes the only way to fix a mistake- is to make it twice.
Julianna Baggott
#78. Finally she said, "When I grow up, I'm going to live out here. I'll probably be a Miss Somebody, too ... "
Don't grow up," I told her. "It only gets more confusing.
Julianna Baggott
#79. She let him go once. Every day demands that she release him over and over again.
Julianna Baggott
#81. Omission is a sin only if, in the process of deceiving, you forget the truth. Lying is a sin only if, in the process, the lie becomes the only truth.
Julianna Baggott
#82. A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.
Julianna Baggott
#83. The truth is that for those 86 long years when the Red Sox went without a World Series win, fans were not only in a recession, but trapped in a longstanding, deeply entrenched sports depression.
Julianna Baggott
#84. You're a hero here.'
'I don't want to be a hero.'
'What do you want?'
'I want to be a leader.
Julianna Baggott
#86. It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer.
Julianna Baggott
#87. When I first met you, I thought we were made for each other even though we seemed like opposites in some ways and we fought. But now ... "
"What?"
"Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other - into the people we should become. Do you know what I mean?
Julianna Baggott
#89. When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher.
Julianna Baggott
#90. She knows that whispers can be useful. Sometimes they contain real information. But usually they're fairy tales and lies. This is the worst kind of whisper, the kind that draws you in, gives you hope.
Julianna Baggott
#91. Don't talk about dying? You want me to talk about love. They're one and the same, child. One and the same.
Julianna Baggott
#93. The box we stored God i kept getting smaller ... until only a speck of god still exists, maybe only an atom.
Maybe an atom is all we need.
Julianna Baggott
#95. I always doubt people ... I've survived by not believing in other human beings.
Julianna Baggott
#96. I've never thought there was anything I could hope to get by praying for it.
Julianna Baggott
#97. I believe we're brutes, but then, miraculously, there are those among us who stand up against that brutishness and remind us of the goodness we're capable of.
Julianna Baggott
#98. I'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination.
Julianna Baggott
#99. I write across genres so I see them, more often, as complementary instead of separated by boundaries.
Julianna Baggott
#100. People never outgrow wanting to be liked for being who they truly are, especially when they've grown up in the limelight or its shadowy edge.
Julianna Baggott
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