zoe c. > zoe's Quotes

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“I am God, la de dah.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.”
― Joan Didion , The White Album

“This sense that the world can be reinvented [evokes] the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring...”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays

“Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I 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

“I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“It had seemed this past month as if they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“straightened the immaculate room as if to erase any sign of herself.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I know what 'nothing' means, and I keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“Maria would say that they were not her friends, but Maria has never understood friendship, conversation, the normal amenities of social exchange. Maria has difficulty talking to people with whom she is not sleeping.

"I go to the Wilshire or the Beverly Hills," I say. "I read the trades, I like to be alone at breakfast."

"In fact he doesn't always get breakfast out," Maria says, very low, to no one in particular. "In fact the last time he got breakfast out was on April 17.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“Secrets are lies that you tell to your friends.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage

“For the first six months, all whe wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf.”
― Eve Babitz, Sex and Rage