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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0df0e01 | It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes. | love marriage partnership | Joan Didion | |
| a5ddf9f | Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. | Joan Didion | ||
| 7fc400e | It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. | Joan Didion | ||
| 7eb1161 | I just can't get that monster out of my mind. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9a92805 | In the popular imagination, the American motion-picture industry still represents a kind of mechanical monster, programmed to stifle and destroy all that is interesting and worthwhile and "creative" in the human spirit." | Joan Didion | ||
| 19da836 | That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than when I am home. Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one's past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room. | Joan Didion | ||
| bf5612b | I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own. | Joan Didion | ||
| 59bfdc5 | She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and 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.. | Joan Didion | ||
| bf854ae | I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error) | Joan Didion | ||
| ab1cbe3 | because in at least one respect California--the California we are talking about--resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento? | Joan Didion | ||
| 5a3799c | It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone's memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else's memory, stories handed down on the family network. | Joan Didion | ||
| 71a3312 | You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0c76eee | Sacramento was the least typical of the Valley towns, and it is--but only because it is bigger and more diverse, only because it has had the rivers and the legislature; its true character remains the Valley character, its virtues the Valley virtues, its sadness the Valley sadness. | Joan Didion | ||
| d9d97ff | August comes on not like a month but like an affliction. | Joan Didion | ||
| 39059db | In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character. | Joan Didion | ||
| d27b0d9 | But perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that they will be missing something. Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older; | Joan Didion | ||
| 3edd308 | Not since Mr. Kaiser," they would say, as if the construction of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on a few acres of reclaimed tidal flat near Fort De Russy had in one swing of the builder's crane wiped out their childhoods and their parents' childhoods, blighted forever some subtropical cherry orchard where every night in the soft blur of memory the table was set for forty-eight in case someone dropped by; as if Henry Kaiser had personally condem.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0bc8d69 | I did that on purpose,' Lucille Miller told Erwin Sprengle later, 'to save myself from letting my heart do something crazy. | Joan Didion | ||
| 917f471 | As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9f16fa3 | Above all, she is the girl who "feels" things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young." | Joan Didion | ||
| 25d3a1a | I'm not optimistic, darling, but I'm hopeful. There's a difference. I'm hopeful. | Joan Didion | ||
| 86e170b | My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing. 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 every.. | Joan Didion | ||
| d9c68eb | By now the sky outside is the color of his marble, but they are all reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm. | Joan Didion | ||
| 573f4cb | The center was not holding. | Joan Didion | ||
| 5fde8cc | We all have our own trips and it is a nice drive. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9d04193 | Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe? The first to send his wild wild vibrations to all those cosmic superstations? For the song he always shouts sends the planets flipping out... But I'll tell you before you think me loony that I'm talking about Narada Muni... Singing | Joan Didion | ||
| 3d654ef | That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day's events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about "shopping,.. | Joan Didion | ||
| e99b838 | Rarely have we seen so much made over so little. | Joan Didion | ||
| 5f879c6 | One of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes. | Joan Didion | ||
| 6d29787 | Particularly out here tonight, in this country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter, it is difficult to believe that "the good" is a knowable quantity." | Joan Didion | ||
| 7951d44 | Across the road at the Faith Community Church a couple of dozen old people, come here to live in trailers and die in the sun, are holding a prayer sing. I cannot hear them and do not want to. 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 unimagin.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 56d0207 | You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing--beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code--what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil." | Joan Didion | ||
| f071787 | But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, m.. | Joan Didion | ||
| da6ab2c | Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter, | Joan Didion | ||
| 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 |