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Joan Didion QUOTES

Joan Didion QUOTES

141 " To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent "

― Joan Didion , Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

142 " Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

143 " We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are be definition more interesting that ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing ... Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rain trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

144 " Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

145 " the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes. "

― Joan Didion , The Year of Magical Thinking

146 " To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone “oppressed” to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make fifty-one per cent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. The creation of this revolutionary “class” was from the virtual beginning the “idea” of the women’s movement, and the tendency for popular discussion of the movement to center for so long around day-care centers is yet another instance of that studied resistance to political ideas which characterizes our national life. "

― Joan Didion , The White Album

147 " 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 , Play It As It Lays

148 " 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. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

149 " What happened in New York and Washington and abroad seemed to impinge not at all upon the Sacramento min. I remember being taken to call upon a very old woman, a rancher's widow, who was reminiscing (the favored conversational mode in Sacramento) about the son of some contemporaries of hers. 'That Johnston boy never did amount to much,' she said. Desultorily, my mother protested: Alva Johnston, she said, had won the Pulitzer Prize, when he was working for The New York Times. Our hostess looked at us impassively. 'He never amounted to anything in Sacramento,' she said. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

150 " Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions" and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means. "

― Joan Didion , The White Album

151 " My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

152 " 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.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. "

― Joan Didion , Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

153 " Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter. "

― Joan Didion , Play It As It Lays

154 " She never puts on any weight, you’ll notice that’s often true of selfish women. "

― Joan Didion , Play It As It Lays

155 " Fui escritora a vida inteira: enquanto escritora, ainda mesmo em criança e muito antes de o que escrevia começar a ser publicado, desenvolvi a percepção de que os significados residem nos ritmos das palavras, das frases e dos parágrafos, técnica de resguardar atrás de um verniz cada vez mais impenetrável qualquer pensamento ou convicção pessoais. O modo como escrevo é quem eu sou ou em quem me tornei; porém, neste caso, quisera ter, em vez de palavras e seus ritmos, uma sala de montagem, equipada com um Avid, um sistema digital de edição, no qual pudesse carregar numa tecla e neutralizar a sequência temporal, mostrando-vos em simultâneo todas as imagens das recordações que agora me chegam, deixando-vos escolher as cenas, as expressões marginalmente diferentes, as leituras variantes dos mesmos diálogos. Neste caso, é-me necessário que tudo aquilo que penso ou em que acredito possa ser penetrável, quanto mais não seja, a mim mesma. "

― Joan Didion , The Year of Magical Thinking

156 " 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 , On Self-Respect

157 " 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. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

158 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

159 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

160 " I just can’t get that monster out of my mind. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem