Julia Quinn Quotes

Sometimes, if I felt badly about myself, I could slyly pull out that I have this famous father.

Until adolescence I thought I had the best mother in the world. Such a graceful mother. I had this fantasy that I was the wrong daughter.

I wanted to impress people because I was kind of a kid who was lost in the crowd - was sort of my, feeling about childhood was being part of a big family.

My whole life, I've felt like I didn't quite measure up.

I think that when a person is insecure about who they are or who they want to be, then it translates on screen, and the choices they make are all about perception.

For a long time I was scared I'd find out I was like my mother.

The fundamental thing about my personality is that I think I'm an imposter.

I'm not the most beautiful one of my family.

Horrible experiences lead us to wonder whether the person who experiences them might not be something horrible.

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

I didn't know what I wanted to Be...A sense that I had permanently botched things already, embarked on the trip without the map. and it scared me too, that I might end up as a mother of 3 working in a psychiatrist's office, or renting surfboards...I guess I saw their lives as failed somehow, absent of the Big Win...What is fate was an inherited trait? What if luck came through the genetic line, and the ability to "succeed" at your chosen "direction" was handed down, just like the family china? Maybe I was destined to be a weed too.

My anguish came from my hypothesis that other people's hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous!

I wasn't sure I was an artist, so I thought maybe I just was throwing ideas out for people to consider.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

Every guy has feminine qualities. You're raised by your mother and father, and so you get qualities from your mother and father. I was mostly with my mother, but I think the pictures turned out good. Whatever.

My mother and grandmothers could never have lived my life; my father and my grandfathers could never have imagined it. But they bestowed on me the promise of America, which made my life and my choices possible.

I am the product of the sustained indignation of a branded grandfather, the militant protest of my grandmother, the disciplined resentment of my father and mother, and the power of the mass action of the church.

My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt.

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

I'm moved by contraries, by opposites, the strength that was my mother's eyes, the beauty of my father's hands.

I was rejected in school because I didn't look like the big-breasted, beautiful girls. I was awkward and sad. My mother always said, "Be original!" but I didn't understand until I changed to be like everyone else.

My identity depended on men for so long. You can be successful and still have the feeling that if you're not with a man you don't exist.

It's as if I've inherited a skin I cannot quite fit, and so I walk about constantly pulling and and tugging, pinning and pruning, trying desperately to fill it out, hoping that no one will look at me struggling and say, 'That one there- she's a fraud, Look how she doesn't fit at all.

I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

I always wince a little bit when I send me to each of my new books. I wince at submitting myself to my father's judgment. But, of course, he's such a fond father that he always writes back, saying it's the greatest thing ever written.