When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
More Quotes from Joan Didion:
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.Joan Didion
That's something we have to feel out. It occurred to me to begin with, as a way of taking it a step further, but there's another argument that the step further may be a bridge too far.
Joan Didion
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
We were that generation called ''silent,'' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.
Joan Didion
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
Joan Didion
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Derek Jacobi
If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?
Robert Fripp
It takes a long time to grow an old friend.
John Leonard