Quotations
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Joan Didion Quotes
«Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?»
«It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
antisocial, apparently, asocial, bottomless, brilliantly, grandly, gulf, gulfs, Gulf of, Howard, Howard Hughes, Hughes, increasingly, largest, officially, prize, secretly, surpassingly
«The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
agent, drove, free agent, Free agents, in case, mobility, nineteenth, nineteenth century, Pacific, privacy, restaurant, sandwich, secret agent, secret agents, the Pacific
«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, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
deceiving, fashionable, hysteria, imperative, imperatives, join us, madmen, pragmatic, thin, whine
«A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
affluence, as such, Order of, pool, soothing, the West, The Western, uncontrollable, Western
«Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
flawless, hotels, mirrors, social service, societies
«We were that generation called ''silent,'' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
dread, escaping, exhilaration, for a while, Just One, masking, official, repression, social action
«Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
Europeans, materialistic, possessions, uneasy, Versed
«A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
casino, casinos, dress whites, halter, halters, Las, Las Vegas, lays, Riviera, The Casino
«There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.»
Author: Joan Didion
(Journalist, Novelist)
| Keywords:
acquisition, central, consuming, cultures, devote, gambler, gamblers, gambling, inability, lowered, sexual activity, the Action, The central, The Gambler, token