Joyce Johnson > Quotes

“I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved.”
― Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958

“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

“If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it until you got it right.”
― Joyce Johnson

“We tend to make up the people we fall in love with”
― joyce johnson, Bad connections

“I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him--they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.”
― Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958

“And isn't it amazing that suicide is illegal when society is so indifferent to human life?”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“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...”
― Joyce Johnson

“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.”
― Joyce Johnson

“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.”
― Joyce Johnson

“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.”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“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.”
― Joyce Johnson

“…I told Jack I had nothing to say about his vision of God. I couldn’t believe in God myself. In his next letter, he lectured me a little. "When I said 'God' in my vision in the sea, I didn’t mean a bearded man in heaven. I meant 'that which passes through all.' …"

But I didn't believe in this Buddhist god either. My mind came up against a wall in these matters. The here and now was all I saw. I wanted to be happy in the here and now; to someday pull Jack into it with me, if I could.”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“assimilation with WASP gentility. Podhoretz makes the declaration that “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.” But Jack Kerouac”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“always listening for the knock of the housing inspector. An older group of painters had survived here since the late 1940s. In lofts deserted by the garment industry, where sewing-machine needles could still be found in the crevices of floorboards, they’d dispensed with the confinements of the easel. Possessing space if little else, they’d tacked their canvases across larger and larger stretches of crumbling plaster, or nailed them to the floor. They threw away palettes and used the metal tops of discarded kitchen tables. Paint would rain down”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“The memoir, whose claims to authority are both modest and pressing, is the genre of afterthoughts, of revision, the counternarrative of lived experience that places an actual fingerprint on the historical monument.”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“ethnically diverse cities. (The number of blacks in Johnson’s New York, for example, doubled between 1940 and 1960; the Puerto Rican population quadrupled.) Teena and her male peers became the “silent generation” whose advent Time magazine announced in 1951, the year Johnson entered Barnard. The “oldest young generation in the world,” in Time’s account, did everything in groups. Apathetic if well-intentioned, its members believed that all the frontiers were closed; heroic achievement and personal adventure were impossible in the age of the big corporation and the national security state. Yet, Time added, they were not happy with their own acquiescence; they had impossible dreams,”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“IN A “DREAM LETTER” from John Clellon Holmes recorded by Allen Ginsberg in 1954 are the words: “The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang.” To which Allen, awakening, writing into his journal, added sternly, “Not society’s perfum’d marriage.”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it till you got it right.”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“having. In trying to trace the derivations of this notion of experience, I come into blind alleys. It was simply there all of a sudden, full-fledged, like a fever I’d come down with. The air carries ideas like germs, infecting some, not others. Real Life was not to be found in the streets around my house, or anywhere on the Upper West Side, for that matter, or in my school of girls grubbing joylessly for marks, hysterical about geometry exams and Latin homework, flirting ridiculously with the seventy-year-old elevator operator,”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“We knew little of political realities. We had the illusion our own passions were enough. We felt that you could change everything just by being loud enough.”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“his own manifesto, which many of the New York painters soon would read: “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.” Substitute painting, color, stroke, and it was close in spirit to the way the painters defined themselves in their heated discussions at “The Club,” a loft on Eighth Street where they met regularly, or over beers at the Cedar Bar, continuing on into dawn over coffee at Riker’s. Blearily”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“Invisibility had become my unsatisfying resolution of the outside/inside problem. Moving back and forth between antithetical worlds separated by subway rides, I never fully was what I seemed or tried to be. I had the feeling I was playing hooky all the time, not from school, but from the person represented by my bland outward appearance — the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Glassman, under whose second-rate identity”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“But with you - I felt as though nothing could touch me, and if anything happened, the Hell with it. 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. So that's why we've all taken off like this, and that's also part of why I love you.”
― Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958

“sized white surfaces — house paint, if there was no money for oils — colors running in rivulets, merging, splashing, coagulating richly in glistening thickness, bearing witness to the gesture of the painter’s arm in a split second of time, like the record of a mad, solitary dance. Or like music, some said, like bop, like a riff by Charlie Parker, incorrigible junky and genius, annihilated by excess in 1955, posthumous hero of the coming moment. Or like Jack’s “spontaneous prose,” another dance in the flow of time. For the final issue of Black Mountain Review, he’d jotted”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“real thing, too, she learned soon enough; the real thing was black. And for Hettie, black came to seem the color of a great deal more that was realer than what she’d known, some purer definition of experience, some essential knowledge that the white suburbs denied their children. Nineteen fifty-seven found her living on Morton Street in the Village and working as a secretary for a struggling jazz magazine called The Record Changer, which would shortly go out of business. LeRoi Jones — late of “the narrow, grey working-”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“JUST WHEN I WAS SO eager to abandon New York, it seemed to turn before my eyes into a kind of Paris. The new cultural wave that had crested in San Francisco was rolling full force into Manhattan, bringing with it all kinds of newcomers — poets, painters, photographers, jazz musicians, dancers — genuine artists and hordes of would-be’s, some submerging almost instantly, others quickly bobbing to the surface and remaining visible. Young and broke,”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“black sweater — but, unlike Masha, she’s not in mourning for her life. How could she have been, with her seat at the table in the exact center of the universe, that midnight place where so much is converging, the only place in America that’s alive? As a female, she’s not quite part of this convergence. A fact she ignores, sitting by in her excitement as the voices of the men, always the men, passionately rise and fall and their beer glasses collect and the smoke of their cigarettes rises toward the ceiling and”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“But in taking such a step, Johnson was not a candidate for glamorization, as Kerouac was when he left Columbia College in 1942 to write and hang out with drug addicts, petty thieves, and homosexual hustlers, “the Rimbauds and Verlaines of America on Times Square,” as he later called them. Deliberate downward mobility”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“Paul Goodman, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Merce Cunning-ham, Edward Dahlberg, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. It was an extraordinary collection of visionary, eccentric, overpowering individuals. Life in that experimental and incestuous community was so highly pitched that Fee, like other Black Mountain alumni I met, never quite got over it. Even Black”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir

“Psychedelic drugs, injunctions like “Do your own thing,” the maxim of postmodernity, had little to do with her experience of exhilarating risks or nonmarketable rewards.”
― Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir