Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

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  • Melhas quotedlast year
    one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
  • Melhas quotedlast year
    It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.”
  • Melhas quotedlast year
    the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.
  • Melhas quotedlast year
    To lack it is to be locked within oneself,
  • Melhas quotedlast year
    To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything
  • Darya Bukhtoyarovahas quoted3 years ago
    If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
  • Darya Bukhtoyarovahas quoted3 years ago
    It is very easy to sit at the bar in, say, La Scala in Beverly Hills, or Ernie’s in San Francisco, and to share in the pervasive delusion that California is only five hours from New York by air. The truth is that La Scala and Ernie’s are only five hours from New York by air. California is somewhere else.
  • Darya Bukhtoyarovahas quoted3 years ago
    Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen
  • Darya Bukhtoyarovahas quoted3 years ago
    One problem is that American directors, with a handful of exceptions, are not much interested in style; they are at heart didactic. Ask what they plan to do with their absolute freedom, with their chance to make a personal statement, and they will pick an “issue,” a “problem.”
  • Darya Bukhtoyarovahas quoted3 years ago
    Stories travel at night on the desert. Someone gets in his pickup and drives a couple of hundred miles for a beer, and he carries news of what is happening, back wherever he came from. Then he drives another hundred miles for another beer, and passes along stories from the last place as well as from the one before; 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.
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