urbancat

“All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. 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 ever procrastination, every word, all of it.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“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. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with
the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive
company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and
surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m.
of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who
betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all
too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We
forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered
and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have
already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“There are two types of women in particular who inspire my envy. The first is an ebullient one, happily engaged from morning until night, able to enjoy things like group lunches, spontaneous vacations to Cartagena with gangs of girlfriends, and planning other people's baby showers. The bigger existential questions don't seem to plague her, and she can clean her stove without ever once thinking, What's the point? It just gets dirty again anyway and then we die. Why don't I just stick my head...”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"