Shima > Shima's Quotes

“How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?”
― Patti Smith, M Train: A Memoir

“Not all dreams need to be realized.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

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

“I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“How could this have happened when everything was normal?”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Mourning has its place but also its limits.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“There he was, he had kept saying later. He was alive and then he was dead and we were watching. We saw him at the instant it happened we knew he was dead before his family did.
Just an ordinary day.
'And then—gone.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.

They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.

They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.”
― Joan Didion

“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“When you hit a wall, just kick it in.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I was too curious about the future to look back.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I was never going to become anything but myself, that i was of the clan of Peter Pan and we did not grow up”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Sometimes I wish I could put my whole life on pause...just make everything stop for a while so I can figure shit out.”
― Mark Salzman, True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall

“I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night.
Only shifts.
Only waiting.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Memory fades, memory adjusts , memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it […]”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Laughter is a rescue.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“After all, hope is a form of planning.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road