“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on the show and merely existed?”
Hunter S. Thompson
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For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L'air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day.
— Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.
— Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
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I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself.
— Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”
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One day you didn’t call. I stayed up all night wondering if something came up,
Or If you grew tired of me,
Maybe you found someone better,
Or worse,
Maybe you woke up and decided that I wasn’t worth the effort anymore
I’ve tasted abandonment before. I know when it’s coming.
I just haven’t gotten used to the taste of it.
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That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
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She sees his spectacle case on the table, and his cigarettes, make of Duet, and she thinks she never wants to sit at a table that doesn’t have his spectacle case and cigarettes on it.
-Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck
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“You care and it’s all over the place.”
— Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait In Letters
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To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
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I got really good at needing nothing. turns out that’s not the flex i thought it was.
