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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 60bb6a5 | Lyle Wirth looked like a serial killer. Which meant he probably wasn't one. If you were chopping up hookers or eating runaways, you'd try to look normal. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 83f8ca7 | She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public was a beloved child. She'd parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people on the sidewalks. When we got home, she'd trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door, and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I had done to displease her. I have .. | child childhood-memory dysfunctional-mother human-accessory jealousy loneliness mother | Gillian Flynn | |
| 65459a5 | Before we start, you have to understand one very key thing about Amy: She is fucking brilliant. Her brain is so busy, it never works on just one level. She's like this endless archaeological dig: You think you've reached the final layer, and then you bring down your pick one more time, and you break through to a whole new mine shaft beneath. With a maze of tunnels and bottomless pits. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 50106bf | Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. | grief-and-loss omens survivors | Joan Didion | |
| b3c6766 | Her choices, all. Sentimental choices, things she remembered. I remembered them too. | Joan Didion | ||
| b014b57 | There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9128fe0 | The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers. | Joan Didion | ||
| 490d108 | Privilege" is something else. "Privilege" is a judgment. "Privilege" is an opinion. "Privilege" is an accusation." | judgment opinion privilege | Joan Didion | |
| dde5d80 | The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer a.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 188b684 | It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. | brave g-n-p purpose social spring united-states-of-america | Joan Didion | |
| 72b99a0 | And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed toga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 3935bb0 | One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say." | Joan Didion | ||
| 27b788f | Tell me," a rabbi asked Daniel Bell when he said, as a child, that he did not believe in God. "Do you think God cares?")" | Joan Didion | ||
| 49af150 | Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is "nothing." | joan-didion nothing play-it-as-it-lays questions | Joan Didion | |
| b7b2c0f | unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother's teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now an.. | Joan Didion | ||
| fce3943 | Some men (fewer women) are solitary, unattached to any particular place or institution, most comfortable not exactly alone but in the presence of strangers. | Joan Didion | ||
| 80a2cdf | Always when I play back my father's voice," Maria says, "it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don't do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply." | Joan Didion | ||
| 18d76cc | I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, fo.. | Joan Didion | ||
| dea1ecc | Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process. | Joan Didion | ||
| 207998c | One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks "stardust" or "caesar's palace." Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with "real" life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. But Las Vegas seems to exist.. | Joan Didion | ||
| a04fd9d | More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child's primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living. | Joan Didion | ||
| 309b2f5 | We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings." | Joan Didion | ||
| e5701e1 | Of course the activists--not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic--had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, Ave could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longe.. | family language youth | Joan Didion | |
| 194444b | That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses .. | freedom wealth | Joan Didion | |
| 777ccb1 | In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you're married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but .. | Joan Didion | ||
| ff70a6f | This sense that the world can be reinvented [evokes] the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring... | Joan Didion | ||
| 1d3770e | No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely. Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already at the threatening point, and none have the right to feel hurt if they are told they can neither be of us.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9108111 | Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. | Joan Didion | ||
| 95e46d7 | Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day. | Joan Didion | ||
| caf6dcb | MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar's alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills. | Joan Didion | ||
| a8d974f | The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star. | Joan Didion | ||
| 2590fb9 | Philippe Aries, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would b.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0c3af5d | In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was "to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened." | Joan Didion | ||
| f0e2ece | Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss. | Joan Didion | ||
| 3af0ea3 | Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. | Joan Didion | ||
| a198af1 | No, baby, I'm all man," he said with a smirk, winking at her. "Want me to prove it?" | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| eaa3783 | Don't it bother you? Sittin' here with ... with someone like me? | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| 31f58ff | love was not a quantifiable substance. There was always more of it somewhere, and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another. | Paul Auster | ||
| f720d76 | la lettura di Delitto e castigo lo cambio, Delitto e castigo fu il fulmine che si abbatte dal cielo e lo mando in frantumi, e quando riusci a riprendersi Ferguson non ebbe piu dubbi sul futuro, se un libro poteva essere questo, se un romanzo poteva fare questo al tuo cuore, alla tua mente e ai tuoi sentimenti piu profondi sul mondo, allora scrivere romanzi era senz'altro la cosa migliore che potevi fare nella vita, perche Dostoevskij gli av.. | Paul Auster | ||
| 4e46b21 | Les moments de crise produsent un redoublement de vie chez les hommes. Moments of crisis produce a redoubled vitality in men. Or, more succinctly perhaps: Men don't begin to live fully until thier backs are against the wall. | Paul Auster | ||
| b587251 | Now that you are living on such intimate terms with her, Gwyn has emerged as a slightly different person... She is both funnier and more salacious than you imagined, more vulgar and idiosyncratic, more passionate, more playful, and you are startled to realize how deeply she exults in filthy language and the bizarre slang of sex... Common twentieth-century words do not interest her. She shuns the term , for example, in favor of older, more .. | Paul Auster | ||
| 2b56a35 | It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable...that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it? | capitalism economics | Paul Mason | |
| f4b59e5 | No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him. | life support | Paul Auster | |
| 7ae8ba0 | The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before. | Paul Auster |