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Book: Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
Quotes of Book: Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
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  1. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship's a little truer That's where the West begins.
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  2. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will,
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  3. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.
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  4. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves-there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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  5. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    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.
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  6. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke.
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  7. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.
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  8. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening.
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  9. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
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  10. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    We went to get away from ourselves, and the way to do that is to drive, down through Nogales some day when the pretty green places pall and all that will move the imagination is some place difficult, some desert.
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  11. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past.
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  12. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

    Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers?
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