Joyce Koh > Joyce Koh's Quotes

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
― Joan Didion

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
― Joan Didion

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
― Joan Didion

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“It's difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. No one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.”
― Russell Brand

“Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.”
― Russell Brand

“For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it's enough that there are trees in the world.”
― Russell Brand

“We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.”
― Russell Brand, Articles of Faith

“From quite early on, I had this idea of compartmentalized identities - 'this is how you are when you are with your mum, and this is how you are when you are with your dad' - so it seemed like I could never absolutely be myself. And the image of myself as compromised and inconsistent made me want to withdraw from the world even further. I had a sense of formulating a paper-mache version of myself to send out in the world, while I sat controlling it remotely from some smug suburban barracks.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.”
― Russell Brand

“Turns out it was mostly a lie. But, at least for a short while, it was a beautiful one.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.” In medieval societies, the biggest buildings were its churches and palaces; using Campbell’s method, we can assume these were feudal cultures that revered their leaders and worshipped God. In modern Western cities, the biggest buildings are the banks—bloody great towers that dominate the docklands—and the shopping centers, which architecturally ape the cathedrals they’ve replaced: domes, spires, eerie celestial calm, fountains for fonts, food courts for pews.”
― Russell Brand, Revolution

“When you fall in love you recognise you're not the most important person in the world, and your focus becomes another person.”
― Russell Brand

“I missed him, of course, but sometimes close friendships have a tidal beat that pulls you towards different shores though the ocean that connects you remains.”
― Russell Brand, Booky Wook 2: This Time it's Personal

“What was alien was being ordinary, being humdrum, being trapped into appeasing...having to crush and stifle my opinions, not being allowed to be brilliant, tricking myself into mediocrity.”
― Russell Brand

“We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires.”
― Russell Brand, Revolution