Meredith

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

“I could indulge here in a little idle generalization, could lay off my own state of profound emotional shock on the larger cultural breakdown, could talk fast about convulsions in the society and alienation and anomie and maybe even assassination, but that would just be one more stylish shell game. I am not a society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“(About Georgia O'Keeffe:) 'The city men.' 'The men.' 'They.' The words crop up again and again as this astonishingly aggressive woman tells us what was on her mind when she was making her astonishingly aggressive paintings. It was those city men who stood accused of sentimentalizing her flowers: "I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see - and I don't.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays