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Slouching Towards Bethlehem QUOTES

Slouching Towards Bethlehem QUOTES

161 " Out under the pepper trees the boys from the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of tequila for one dollar American, but it was inside the cavernous empty commissary where the talent sat around, the reasons for the exercise, all sitting around the big table picking at huevos con queso and Carta Blanca beer. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

162 " Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

163 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

164 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

165 " 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 playing. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

166 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

167 " 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 rustling, the wind. Then he stands by a window, and plays a flashlight over the dry wash outside. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

168 " My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as “Joan’s husband.” Marriage is the classic betrayal. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

169 " Marriage is the classic betrayal "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

170 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

171 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

172 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

173 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

174 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

175 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

176 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

177 " 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 , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

178 " 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 evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

179 " To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem

180 " We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. "

― Joan Didion , Slouching Towards Bethlehem