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

    it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.
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  2. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Someday it all comes.
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  3. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went "but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me," and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
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  4. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.
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  5. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Let me tell you what it is like out here tonight. Stories travel at night on the desert. Someone gets in his pickup and drives a couple of hundred miles for a beer, and he carries news of what is happening, back wherever he came from. Then he drives another hundred miles for another beer, and passes along stories from the last place as well as from the one before; it is a network kept alive by people whose instincts tell them that if they do not keep moving at night on the desert they will lose all reason.
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  6. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    I went to Newport not long ago, to see the great stone fin-de-siècle "cottages" in which certain rich Americans once summered. The places loom still along Bellevue Avenue and Cliff Walk, one after another, silk curtains frayed but gargoyles intact, monuments to something beyond themselves; houses built, clearly, to some transcendental point. No one had made clear to me exactly what that point was.
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  7. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But its really God - playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven - shattering stained glass - playing a gigantic organ - thundering on the keys - perfect harmony - perfect joy.
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  8. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?
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  9. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was "This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy." That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.
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  10. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come-was anyone ever so young?
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  11. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present, or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.
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  12. Joan Didion _ Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginning of self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.
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