Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.

— Julia Glass

And there was the moon. A warm and visible greeting, a beacon of relief. Full, enshrouded, its edges crisp. It looked like an airy wafer-what were those crackers that came in the big green tin? She stared at the moon and thought about the fact that she was breathing. Fact of breathing, fact of life. This she could control: slow down and speed up her breathing, despite the pain in her throat. She'd never really looked at the moon, never really seen how intricate the etchings on its yellowy silver surface. Bowl of a spoon in candlelight. When she'd looked a long time- I see the moon, and the moon sees me- a glimmering ring like a rainbow materialized at the rim. In the memory she still retained, as clear as a framed snapshot, a portrait worn in a locket, Saga stared at the moon that way for hours, and it kept her company, it kept her sane, it kept her in one piece, it kept her alive. It was proof, fact, patience, faith.

— Julia Glass

Before heading back up the road, she had turned for a moment toward the sea. In the late afternoon light, the water was gray wrinkled with orange. Tiger water, she called it when it looked like that. Rhino water was smooth and leaden, dull as smoke. But her favorite was polar bear water, when the moon hung low and large, as if too heavy to rise very high, and scattered great radiant patches, like ice floes, across a dark blue ocean.

— Julia Glass

But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greene, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps they were like recipes, he pondered now, and the key to success was in finding the ingredients you had to remove, the components that turned all the others bitter, excessively salty, difficult to swallow; even too jarringly sweet. He had seen Greene clarify butter, wash rice, Devlin shrimp, and meticulously snip the talons from artichoke leaves.

— Julia Glass

Clever how the cosmos can, in a single portent, be ingratiating yet sadistic.

— Julia Glass

Colorful garments - ball gowns, kimonos, evening pajamas - made from yards upon yards of iridescent silk or velvet. I own an unjustifiable number of such outfits and jump at the chance to wear them. Against the etiquette about which I am otherwise all too conscious, I frequently, and unrepentantly, overdress for the occasion.

— Julia Glass

God, Lou. Don’t you think I want you to have what you want?”“You’re my sister. You’re supposed to want those things for me.”“You can’t have it both ways, Lou. When things get bad, you can’t call me—which I’m gadabout, I am!—you can’t do that and then imply I don’t give a shit about you.”“That’s what I used to think.

— Julia Glass

Hugo planned a five-course meal: smoked duck, oyster stew, roast beef with mashed yams, a salad of apples with beets and blue cheese, then chocolate banana cream pie. Rich, rich, and richer still. Ben made pitchers of martinis and set aside thirty-five bottles of a tried-and-true Napa Cabernet, pure purple velvet, and an Oregonian pilot Gris, grassy and effervescent.

— Julia Glass

I come from a culture of hand wringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.

— Julia Glass

I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.

— Julia Glass