1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
5654
5655
5656
5657
5658
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9cc58ea | That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory. | Joan Didion | ||
| ad742f6 | Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years. | Joan Didion | ||
| 7ae82f8 | There is an airport in Hermosillo, and Hermosillo is only eighty-five miles about Guaymas, but to fly is to miss the point. The point is to become disoriented, shriven, by the heat and the deceptive perspectives and the oppressive sense of carrion. The road shimmers. The eyes want to close. | Joan Didion | ||
| 06479dd | I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever is in the air. | Joan Didion | ||
| ace2d39 | The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. | Joan Didion | ||
| c52638e | It is three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon and 105deg and the air so thick with smog that the dusty palm trees loom up with a sudden and rather attractive mystery. | Joan Didion | ||
| 285d813 | They worry a great deal about 'responding to one another with beauty and tenderness,' and their response to one another is in fact so tender that an afternoon at the school tends to drift perilously into the never-ever. | Joan Didion | ||
| 685b8f1 | So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4f67e8f | It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. | Joan Didion | ||
| c448c6f | I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before. | Joan Didion | ||
| 47f018e | Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. | Joan Didion | ||
| f952d6a | I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later - because I did not belong there, did not come from there - but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. | Joan Didion | ||
| 068f5b1 | I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. | Joan Didion | ||
| 51c880e | Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9199998 | The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardeni.. | Joan Didion | ||
| c5b6cd0 | Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. | Joan Didion | ||
| 28ca626 | What kind of magpie keeps this notebook? | Joan Didion | ||
| 53db8f6 | I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be. | Joan Didion | ||
| 7706d47 | I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a "specialist." He wrote down a psychiatrist's name and address for me, but I did not g.. | Joan Didion | ||
| edd9707 | They come from all over, and they are on the average very young, very earnest, and not very much in touch with the larger scene, less refugees from it than children who do not quite apprehend it. | Joan Didion | ||
| 7ab6f18 | We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water. | letting-go-of-the-past letting-go | Joan Didion | |
| 770510d | The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people," she said. "The hardest is with one." | Joan Didion | ||
| da377f0 | This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the .. | Joan Didion | ||
| ff987c6 | Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal. | Joan Didion | ||
| a690b5e | I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. | Joan Didion | ||
| 7e8bafd | I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $ 1,000 a month. "Someday you will," she said lazily. "Someday it all comes." There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorc.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 420ce13 | My mother had been baking more often in general, but she took plates of desserts to the carpentry studio, where her boss, thank God, had a sweet tooth. He just loved the cheesecake, she'd tell me, shining. He ate all of my oatmeal cookies. Some charmed combination of the woodwork, and the studio people, and the splinter excising time with her son kept her going back to Silver Lake even when she hit her usual limits, and every night, tucked .. | lane-edelstein baking scents | Aimee Bender | |
| 0907924 | In the evenings, my father and I ate dinner quietly in front of the TV together. Wednesday night, Thursday. Frozen dinners I'd picked out at the grocery store, greatest hits by my favorite factories. One of the best ones, in Indiana, prided itself on a no touch food assembly, which meant every step was monitored by robotic arms, ones that placed the tortillas into the dish, layered them with cheese, dropped dollops of tomato sauce on top, a.. | food-factories greatest-hits rose-edelstein indiana grocery-shopping ingredients | Aimee Bender | |
| 8cb8f2f | In those days, she let her hair loose, down to her waist, and whenever I met old friends of hers, they would describe my mother as having resembled a mermaid with legs. With a sheerness to her skin that people wanted to shield. | Aimee Bender | ||
| afb78e0 | I started in our neighborhood, buying a pastrami burrito at Oki Dog and a deluxe gardenburger at Astro Burger and matzoh-ball soup at Greenblatt's and some greasy egg rolls at the Formosa. In part funny, and rigid, and sleepy, and angry. People. Then I made concentric circles outward, reaching first to Canter's and Pink's, then rippling farther, tofu at Yabu and mole at Alegria and sugok at Marouch; the sweet-corn salad at Casbah in Silver .. | walks-of-life moods rose-edelstein restaurants emotions food | Aimee Bender | |
| e7e9cc3 | My mouth- always so active, alert- could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I'd use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the cou.. | food-sensor rose-edelstein oranges | Aimee Bender | |
| 84d9b9c | What I taste, I said, reading from my page, is what I remember from my last Dorito, plus the chemicals that are kind of like that taste, and then my zoned-out mind that doesn't really care what it actually tastes like. Remembering, chemicals, zoning. It is a magical combo. All these parts form together to make a flavor sensation trick that makes me want to eat the whole bag and then maybe another bag. Do you have another bag? asked a skateb.. | doritos rose-edelstein taste | Aimee Bender | |
| 7c421a9 | George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathro.. | george-malcolm helixes spirals shapes physics | Aimee Bender | |
| 9f1804c | The sensor did not seem to be restricted to my mother's food, and there was so much to sort through, a torrent of information, but with George there, sitting in the fading warmth of the filtered afternoon springtime sun spilling through the kitchen windows, making me buttered toast which I ate happily, light and good with his concentration and gentle focus, I could begin to think about the layers. The bread distributor, the bread factory, t.. | buttered-toast layers wisconsin food-sensor | Aimee Bender | |
| b5c81ab | Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear. How I loved those flower moments, like when he pointed out the moon and Jupiter, but they were rare, and never to be expected. | desert-blooms joseph-edelstein rare-mom siblings | Aimee Bender | |
| c26f490 | On the kitchen counter, she'd set out the ingredients: Flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges. A shallow glass bowl of lemon peel. I toured the row. This was the week of my ninth birthday, and it had been a long day at school of cursive lessons, which I hated, and playground yelling about point scoring, and the sunlit kitchen and my warm-eyed mother were welc.. | lane-edelstein lemon-cake rose-edelstein ingredients | Aimee Bender | |
| 262f6f9 | I bit into the oatmeal. Same levels- now the oats, well dried, but not so well watered, then the raisins, half tasteless, made from parched grapes, picked by thirsty workers, then the baker, rushed. The whole cookie was so rushed, like I had to eat it fast or it would, somehow, eat me. | in-a-rush oatmeal-cookies ingredients | Aimee Bender | |
| 3b1e319 | By her estimation, the woman had probably been five years old during the height of the war. Listening to panicked voices in the next room. The majority of the living memories now owned by then-children. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 3cb11da | She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. "Someone else should speak instead," he said. "If I don't speak, it means someone else will," which did not always turn out to be true." | Aimee Bender | ||
| 5a8e692 | My birthday cake was her latest project because it was not from a mix but instead built from scratch- the flour, the baking soda, lemon-flavored because at eight that had been my request; I had developed a strong love for sour. We'd looked through several cookbooks together to find just the right one, and the smell in the kitchen was overpoweringly pleasant. To be clear: the bite I ate was delicious. Warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfol.. | lemon-flavor rose-edelstein mother-and-daughter sour | Aimee Bender | |
| ee0c108 | Well, the truth is, vacations are pointless anyway, because you always have to come back, so you might as well save time, skip the middle step, and stay put in the first place. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 8ddd31c | Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horses's mane, it did not leave, once lodged, did it? It simply changed form, and asked repeatedly for attention and care as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider, smaller, sure, but never gone...Out of my body, .. | grief loss the-devourings | Aimee Bender | |
| 8a480bc | There's an exercise I'll do sometimes with a class in which we'll start with a word; I'll give everyone a word, and they'll write based on that word, and as they're writing I'll interrupt often and tell them to write more on the setting they're developing. I'll stop the process again and give intrusive instructions about developing the character in the setting, and on and on. The purpose of this is to allow the development of the fruit that.. | Christopher Beha | ||
| ba8fa62 | A few years ago, I listened to a rabbi give a talk and she was explaining what a blessing is. It is a naming of something, she said. What you are blessing already has to be latent in the person, otherwise it doesn't mean anything. But if it is (latent), and you bless what hasn't yet come forth - the fruit - it is a very powerful action. Think of your writing as bestowing a blessing. I'll leave you with that. (Aimee Bender, "On the Making of.. | Christopher Beha |