Home > Author > Joyce Johnson
1 " I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves. "
― Joyce Johnson , Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir
2 " If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it until you got it right. "
― Joyce Johnson
3 " We tend to make up the people we fall in love with "
― Joyce Johnson , Bad Connections
4 " And isn't it amazing that suicide is illegal when society is so indifferent to human life? "
5 " In the 1950s, there was a sense that literature and writing had a burning importance — that you could write a book or paint a painting and change the world. That kind of faith seems to be lacking now. Literature has been pushed toward the sidelines of [modern day] culture. There isn't that sense of centrality or permanence to the written word — everything seems more disposable. "
6 " Now your return has started to be real. I've always been convinced that until you were in the door that you'd never get here and have always felt I'd never see you again when I saw you off, which is why I wept. And I always used to half dread your coming, because it meant the beginning of your going away and every moment that you were here seemed terribly fraught somehow, painful... I've never had such a sense of the rush of time, and yet the weeks that you were here seemed very, very long, and when I was alone again, it seemed as if I'd been away for a year. Strange... And now it will be different - there'll be more ease between us, I think... Well, I wonder what you think about all this... I used to doubt whether you knew anything about me... but perhaps now I think you've known everything all along. Didn't think you were as wise as you are now, but your perfect knowledge of yourself and everything around you shook me up and astounded me. "
7 " Still, I wouldn't have turned back if given the choice. At twenty-one, I felt I had gone to the bottom and floated up; I had the lightness of feeling there was nothing left to lose... "
8 " You don't know what narrow lives girls have, how few real adventures there are for them; misadventures, yes, like abortions and little men following them in subways, but seldom anything like seeing ships at night. "
9 " There's a school of wisdom about love that says the surest way to lose someone is to hold on to them too tightly -- as demonstrated over and over again by the split-ups of lovers, but also by parents and children. Although there it's more complicated by far. Lovers, initially strangers, become strangers again; the tie between parent and child pulls and twists for a lifetime, taking on the strangest forms. "
10 " ...the thing was, not to go home. "
11 " I kept learning about being a widow in little, distant flashes. I saw that after a long while, if you had no one to touch you, you might eventually become someone who went to beauty parlors and paid to have strangers do your hair. You'd pay for the sensation of it, the hands of another human being pouring warmth on you, gently smoothing, stroking. You'd close your eyes and lean back into those hands and your face might have exactly that look, I thought.Life just goes on, you see, any old way it can. Even the dead can't interrupt the flow. "
