South and West: From a Notebook
Joan Didion
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?”
“It was the kind of Sunday to make one ache for Monday morning.”
“In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect. The effect is lively and avaricious and intensely self-absorbed, a tone not uncommon in colonial cities, and the principal reason I find such cities invigorating.”
“To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.”
“Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look "right" to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.”
“In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.”
“I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.”
“I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.”
“The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.”
“The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state.”
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Book Keywords:
sunday, gulf, southern, monday, eccentric, west, history, anger, south
