Margaret

“Everybody says I’m politically naive, and I am,” she says after a while. It is something she says frequently to people she does not know. “So are the people running politics, or we wouldn’t be in wars, would we.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

“So much beauty in this dark and dreary scene! Oh, to breathe in this moist air! This was how life should be lived: attuned to nature, its every flutter and sway, while time moves inexorably forward. Rejoicing in every moment, finding a lifetime in each and every one, in the knowledge that these moments were revealing themselves to me as to no other. Never forgetting that there existed another with whom I could share all my thoughts. I just had to wait...”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madona con abrigo de piel

“How easily people can read each other!…And there I was, trying so hard to penetrate someone else’s mind, to find out if the soul hiding inside it was ordered or in turmoil. For even the most wretched and simpleminded man could be a surprise, even a fool could have a soul whose torments were a constant source of amazement. Why are we so slow to see this, and why do we assume that it is the easiest thing in the world to know and judge another? Why, when we are reluctant even to describe a wedge of cheese we are seeing for the first time, do we draw our final conclusions from our first encounters with people, and happily dismiss them?”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

“During the years when I found it necessary to revise the circuitry of my mind I discovered that I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why. I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge. In this light all narrative was sentimental. In this light all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album