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Book: Where I Was From
Quotes of Book: Where I Was From
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  1. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    You couldn't pay for her hats,' her father, a ship's captain, had told her suitors by way of discouragement, and perhaps they had all been discouraged but my grandfather, an innocent from the Georgetown Divide who read books.
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  2. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their {it now seems} entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in toher words the pauperization of California, had in fact begun at the time Americans first entered the state, took what they could, and, abetted by the native weekness for boosterism, set about selling the rest.
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  3. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
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  4. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    Discussion of how California has 'changed,' then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.
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  5. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich.
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  6. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes.
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  7. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    Raised to believe that her life would be, as her great-grandmother's was said to have been, one ceaseless round of fixed and settled principles, aims, motives, and activity, she could sometimes think of nothing to do but walk downtown, check out the Bon Marche for clothes she could not afford, buy a cracked crab for dinner and take a taxi home.
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  8. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.
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  9. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
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  10. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.
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  11. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    I closed the box and put it in a closet.There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."
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  12. Joan Didion _ Where I Was From

    one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen.
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