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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 767d5e3 | We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all. | Joan Didion | ||
| aae2e3e | He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them | Joan Didion | ||
| 41ec0d2 | I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of "sin"-this sense that it was possible to go "too far", and that many people were doing it-this was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical ten.. | california los-angeles | Joan Didion | |
| 0db1b60 | Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. | Joan Didion | ||
| eed58ca | Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9ff1260 | The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state. | Joan Didion | ||
| 77e6cee | Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But its really God -- playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven -- shattering stained glass -- playing a gigantic organ -- thundering on the keys -- perfect harmony -- perfect joy. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0946bf0 | I went to Newport not long ago, to see the great stone fin-de-siecle "cottages" in which certain rich Americans once summered. The places loom still along Bellevue Avenue and Cliff Walk, one after another, silk curtains frayed but gargoyles intact, monuments to something beyond themselves; houses built, clearly, to some transcendental point. No one had made clear to me exactly what that point was." | Joan Didion | ||
| a17a26b | Let me tell you what it is like out here tonight. Stories travel at night on the desert. Someone gets in his pickup and drives a couple of hundred miles for a beer, and he carries news of what is happening, back wherever he came from. Then he drives another hundred miles for another beer, and passes along stories from the last place as well as from the one before; it is a network kept alive by people whose instincts tell them that if they d.. | Joan Didion | ||
| b988b15 | I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center. | identity | Joan Didion | |
| 041e0aa | In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect. The effect is lively and avaricious and intensely self-absorbed, a tone not uncommon in colonial cities, and the principal reas.. | Joan Didion | ||
| c2bd4d3 | 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 yoga, 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 | ||
| 4247ba8 | Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it [...] | Joan Didion | ||
| b1ec50a | I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen. | Joan Didion | ||
| 56a62f5 | Ever since the 1960s, upon the urging of Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and the all-knowing Dr. Spock,* mothers have been encouraged to read to their children at a very early age. For toddlers and preschoolers who relish this early diet of literacy, libraries become a second home, story hour is never long enough, and parents can't finish a book without hearing a little voice beg, "Again... again." For most literary geek girls, it's at this age that.. | Leslie Simon | ||
| eb7b4ca | There is the who they thought they were and the who they wrote down, the something lost and the something gained, the discrepancy, now easily measured, between the voice they hear in their heads and the voice they find on their paper. "Our notebooks give us away," Joan Didion observes. And they do. They also provide, to memoir makers, a shelf and a foundation," | Beth Kephart | ||
| 223ecd3 | Out under the pepper trees the boys from the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of tequila for one dollar American, but it was inside the cavernous empty commissary where the talent sat around, the reasons for the exercise, all sitting around the big table picking at huevos con queso and Carta Blanca beer. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9193152 | I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game? | Joan Didion | ||
| 2a80fc5 | Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. | Joan Didion | ||
| e7a9e52 | One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of 'privilege'? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity? | Joan Didion | ||
| 292ce31 | The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. | Joan Didion | ||
| af1705b | The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago. | Joan Didion | ||
| dc2f992 | Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you. | Joan Didion | ||
| 3e85e79 | It was a dizzying prospect--to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made. | Paul Auster | ||
| 52f80e6 | Amy fu il premio degli Schneiderman, il regalo di Natale nascosto sotto un mucchio di carta appallottolata che non lo trovi finche la festa non e finita e gli ospiti sono andati tutti a casa. | Paul Auster | ||
| ae16159 | In the interim, in the void between the moment he opens the door and the moment he begins to reconquer the emptiness, his mind flails in a wordless panic. It is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of his room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole. | Paul Auster | ||
| 326c0a1 | Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. | Paul Auster | ||
| b43cd04 | man unable to see anything but the thoughts inside his own head, a man who was there but not there, gone. That was the real difference, Ferguson concluded. Not too little money or too much money, not what a person did or failed to do, not buying a larger house or a more expensive car, but ambition. That explained why Brownstein and Solomon managed to float through their lives in relative peace--because they weren't tormented by the curse of.. | Paul Auster | ||
| 481dee1 | But gradually, as he tried to inhabit the room presented on the canvas (Van Gogh - The Bedroom), he began to experience it as a prison, an impossible space, an image, not so much of a place to live, but of the mind that has been forced to live there. Observe carefully. The bed blocks one door, a chair blocks the other door, the shutters are closed: you can't get in, and once you are in, you can't get out. Stifled among the furniture and eve.. | Paul Auster | ||
| 7d0b223 | Before him, also, was the memory of how John Paul II had chosen to die in public; there was an almost carnivalesque atmosphere to those final dying days of which the austere reserved Bavarian disapproved. | Paul Vallely | ||
| cd3b80d | Fuck Edison and his goddamned lightbulb. | Paul Auster | ||
| 8f6f2aa | En ultima instancia, una vida no es mas que la suma de hechos contingentes, una cronica de intersecciones casuales, de azares, de sucesos fortuitos que no revelan nada mas que su propia falta de proposito. | Paul Auster | ||
| e119e67 | m mn 'mr bqin fy twld Hytn sw~ lmwt; hdhh hy lHqyq@ lty l ymkn tbsyTh, nn fnwn. | Paul Auster | ||
| fc05d96 | qd tmkn mn lbq `l~ msf@ tfSlh `n lHy@ lky ytjnb lnGmr fy jrynh wsr`@ 'shyy'h. | Paul Auster | ||
| a3ebf19 | I would resurrect that person in words, and once the pages had been printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something to hold on to for the rest of their lives. Not only that, but something that would outlive them, that would outlive us all. One should never underestimate the power of books. | Paul Auster | ||
| 34ab943 | There it was: a full confession. Sherlock Holmes had done it again, and as I marveled at my devastating powers of deduction, I wished there had been two of me so I could have patted myself on the back. I know it sounds arrogant, but how often does one achieve a mental triumph of that magnitude? After listening to her speak just two words, I had nailed the whole bloody thing. If Watson had been there, he would have been shaking his head and .. | sherlock-holmes witty | Paul Auster | |
| 33a1d58 | Slowly. Very slowly, sliding my nails along the entire length of the hair. Ah. The satisfactions were immense, incalculable. All that powder flying off of me! The storms, the blizzards, the whirlwinds of whiteness! It was no easy job, let me tell you, but little by little every trace of the O'Dell's would disappear. The do would be undone, and by the time the last bell rang and the teacher sent us home, my scalp would be tingling with happi.. | Paul Auster | ||
| 60ce4a9 | In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man. Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well. If, while he was alive, I kept looking for him, kept trying to find the father who was not there, now that he is dead I still feel as though I must go on looking for him. Death has not changed anything. The only difference is that I have run out of time. | Paul Auster | ||
| 00ee16d | Anny hasn't changed her letter paper, I wonder if she still buys it at the little stationer's in Piccadilly. I think that she has also kept her coiffure, her heavy blonde locks she didn't want to cut. She must struggle patiently in front of mirrors to save her face: it isn't vanity or fear of growing old; she wants to stay as she is, just as she is. Perhaps this is what I liked best in her, this austere loyalty to her most insignificant fea.. | Jean-Paul Sartre | ||
| fb5d070 | Walls, windows, roof, verandah-entirely commonplace, mean even-moved her with the austere poetry of their function. Here a man sheltered from and diminished the horror and vulgarity of the world by the simplicity of his arrangements for living in it. | Paul Scott | ||
| e64492a | The Progressives] outlook was activist and optimistic, not fatalist and despondent. The distinctive characteristic of the Progressives was their conviction that social evils would not remedy themselves and that it was foolhardy to wait passively for time's cure. As Herbert Croly put it, they did not believe that the future would take care of itself. Neither should we. | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| b41abef | 1. Institutions shape politics. The rules and standard operating procedures that make up institutions leave their imprint on political outcomes by structuring political behavior. Outcomes are not simply reducible to the billiard-ball interaction of individuals nor to the intersection of broad social forces. Institutions influence outcomes because they shape actors' identities, power, and strategies. 2. Institutions are shaped by history. Wh.. | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| 100e34c | More plausible suspects in our mystery are the things that students collectively bring with them to school, ranging from(on the positive side of the ledger) academic encouragement at home and private funding for "extras" to (on the negative side) crime, drugs, and disorder. Whom you go to school with matters a lot." | Robert D. Putnam | ||
| c966068 | Stressful conditions from outside school are much more likely to intrude into the classroom in high poverty schools. Every one of ten stressors is two to three times more common in high poverty schools-- Student hunger, unstable housing, lack of medical and dental care, caring for family members, immigration issues, community violence and safety issues. | classroom poverty | Robert D. Putnam |