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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ca7d7cb | The bartender was another old, gray-haired fat guy. It seemed like a joke, how much all these dudes looked alike, like living was so hard it just erased your features, rubbed out anything distinctive. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| f4bb62a | You're still desperate to have everyone think you're perfect. You never want to be the bad guy. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| e1d280c | I had that overwhelming feeling I get when I'm about to give up on a plan, that big rush of air when I realize that my stroke of genius has flaws, and I don't have the brains or energy to fix them. It | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 6d0d36d | The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are "value free," that is, "quality free," has got to go." | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 5658275 | In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it. | Alex Haley | ||
| 768e150 | Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help. | Alex Haley | ||
| 5990d73 | Moja dusze wypelniala litosc nade mna samym. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 636f394 | If I had been taking hashish, I could not have dreamed of this. | Alex Haley | ||
| 11c7bc5 | As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs. | Joan Didion | ||
| 1b6b1a6 | Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices--TV, jets, freeways and so on--but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| c8c197f | There's a war on for your mind! | Alex Jones | ||
| a5bea7b | We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. | Joan Didion | ||
| a14e4cc | We went to get away from ourselves, and the way to do that is to drive, down through Nogales some day when the pretty green places pall and all that will move the imagination is some place difficult, some desert. | Joan Didion | ||
| eb2f37b | The beaches at Malibu are neither white nor as wide as the beach at Carmel. The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks. For these and other reasons Malibu tends to astonish and disappoint those who have never seen it, and yet its very name remains, in the imagination of people all over the world, a kind of shorthand for the easy life. I had not before 1971 and .. | Joan Didion | ||
| 99c600f | what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention. | Joan Didion | ||
| aa6eef0 | I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count. | Joan Didion | ||
| 2fa3e62 | It is not exactly any of these things. It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolently "democratic," flattened out, mediocre and "open" and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn. It is the arch.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 2ff87b1 | 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, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be .. | Joan Didion | ||
| 6d313ed | it is a network kept alive by people whose instincts tell them that if they do not keep moving at night on the desert they will lose all reason. | Joan Didion | ||
| 5e4960a | What I can hear are occasional coyotes and a constant chorus of "Baby the Rain Must Fall" from the jukebox in the Snake Room next door, and if I were also to hear those dying voices, those Midwestern voices drawn to this lunar country for some unimaginable atavistic rites, rock of ages cleft for me, I think I would lose my own reason. Every now and then I imagine I hear a rattlesnake, but my husband says that it is a faucet, a paper rustlin.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 8f33eef | My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as "Joan's husband." Marriage is the classic betrayal." | Joan Didion | ||
| 95d395a | Marriage is the classic betrayal | Joan Didion | ||
| 71abeab | Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? | Joan Didion | ||
| 6918aa1 | January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past. | Joan Didion | ||
| 8f1496a | To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand. | Joan Didion | ||
| e94b8b7 | To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0e44cfb | I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. | Joan Didion | ||
| db666eb | But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. | Joan Didion | ||
| de5126f | The second kind of grief was "complicated grief," which was also known in the literature as "pathological bereavement" and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another." -- | Joan Didion | ||
| 787307d | Doliul e diferit. Doliul nu stie ce-i distanta. Durerea vine in valuri, paroxisme, revelatii subite care-ti taie genunchii, iti iau vederea si iti tulbura curgerea zilelor. | Joan Didion | ||
| df48a3d | 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 | ||
| 993eb63 | We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate. | fate meaningless silent-generation | Joan Didion | |
| f048f22 | De ce trebuie sa ai mereu dreptate, imi spunea el. N-a inteles vreodata ca in mintea mea n-aveam niciodata dreptate. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4062bf8 | Doliul se dovedeste a fi un loc pe care il cunoastem doar atunci cand ajungem la el. [...] Nu putem sti dinainte despre faptul nesfarsitei absente care urmeaza (si aici sta esenta deosebirii intre doliul imaginat de noi si cel real), golul, opusul extrem al sensului, succesiunea inexorabila de momente in timpul carora ne vom confrunta cu experienta zadarniciei insesi. | Joan Didion | ||
| a1ee571 | De fiecare data aceste rugaminti pentru prezenta lui nu au facut decat sa-mi intareasca constiinta tacerii definitive care ne-a despartit. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9a92a67 | Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went "but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me," and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. 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 evid.. | Joan Didion | ||
| c0ef4dd | Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. | Joan Didion | ||
| 5681a53 | or amended and saved at 1:08 p.m. that afternoon | Joan Didion | ||
| d16558f | We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 2dfee80 | Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. 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 | ||
| 49cf947 | Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship's a little truer That's where the West begins. | Joan Didion | ||
| 1b25360 | As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9a5cb88 | I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. "I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling .. | Joan Didion | ||
| 283d85a | I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. | Joan Didion |