Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, thing have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with "morality." Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.
Joan Didion
Related When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not th... JOAN DIDION When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not ... JOAN DIDION Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters. JEFFREY FRY Being present is being connected to All Things. S. KELLEY HARRELL, M. DIV. 35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give... JAMES C. DOBSON Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an... LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD We may claim to believe in God, but we don't want to believe so much that it makes us different. CRAIG GROESCHEL When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral... JOAN DIDION The Bible consistently and directly indicates that when we give generously, we're serving, honoring,... CRAIG GROESCHEL The universe is so vast, so immense, we can never expect to explore it all. It is in effect, not so ... CHRISTINA ENGELA Air is approximately 21% oxygen, our brains feed off of oxygen. So basically we are all airheads. ANDONI GARCIA Inspired By Beauty In Creation We Are One DANIEL GILMAN If you love someone you must set them free like the wind and give them the respect they deserve.If y... GARY F EVANS... All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom w... JOAN DIDION We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It... COLSON WHITEHEAD If we all look at life we think how nice, then we look at death and everybody goes oh you can say th... GARY F EVANS... It is when we think we can act like God, that all respect is lost, and I think this is the downfall ... C. JOYBELL C. So long as we do not know definitely what we want, our forces will be scattered, and so long as our ... CHRISTIAN D. LARSON That's why we seize the moment try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it. EMINEM Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not. SONYA.E.WILLIAMS To stand on the brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation—with no feeli... ASK AND IT IS GIVEN Everyone is the Umbrella Man and he is everyone. Every cough, sneeze, smile and wave means both ever... CRAIG CLEVENGER What love is it, then, that has no need of words to call us? In whose image are we made, to take suc... CHRISTIAN BOBIN The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me... HENRY DAVID THOREAU The battle is not physical, it is spiritual and your mind is the battleground. Keep your mind pure a... JEANETTE CORON So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom or tasted... JULIAN THE APOSTATE So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom or tasted... JULIAN THE APOSTATE Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give plea... ALDOUS HUXLEY Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Plea... ALDOUS HUXLEY Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you... C. JOYBELL C. The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then... TOM ROBBINS This is the fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our eff... C.S. LEWIS Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect ... THOMAS HARRIS I like it when one is not certain what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken ... SAUL LEITER There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made ... GEORGE SANTAYANA We ought to, as human beings, have the courage to seek a collective “truth” that benefits our sp... TARUN BETALA It is what it is, it is what you make it. JAMES DURBIN All of this is moving. Perhaps it's not moving as quickly as we would like it to or as we as a natio... BOB DINNEEN Thus it often is with us, we take a course, and we keep to it, as if we were infallible, and we allo... G.A. HENTY People like us, we think differently, don't we? We are different. We do all the things that others d... SIMON MORDEN Yet it is unassailably true that so long as we lack omniscience and do not know all of the future, a... MORRIS F. COHEN What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act? CRAIG GROESCHEL If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without ... FREDERICK BUECHNER Concluding a short series on prayer: He that seeks God in everything is sure to find God in everyt... WILLIAM LAW Words are really a mask,' he said. 'They rarely express the true meaning; in fact they tend to hide ... MIGUEL SERRANO Feast of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, Martyr, c.155 We may search so far, and reason so long of fa... JOHN DONNE It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When... THOMAS MERTON All religious and spiritual practices lead to one deep realisation: We Are One. All is One. ANITA B. SULSER You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrai... HOPE MIRRLEES Tomorrow is promised to no one. Prioritize today accordingly. GINA GREENLEE The answer isn't more time but a greater awareness of the time we have. CRAIG GROESCHEL When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply... JUDITH BUTLER Destiny consist in the moments that we experienced, and not in the choices we have to do. DANIEL MELGAçO When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ... ERIK PEVERNAGIE We all live in the same house, we all must be part of the effort to hold down our little house. When... JOHN LEWIS Not," Swift said firmly, "for all the tea in China." "That expression has never made sense to m... LISA KLEYPAS Our deepest sense of contentment comes in those times when we have forgotten about all the things we... GWEN RANDALL-YOUNG It is a lie. ARTHUR MILLER Our lives!!! We have just all of a sudden discovered that here we are with something called life see... SUNDAY ADELAJA So, tomorrow, I'm leaving. And I'm not going to let that happen again with anyone else. I'm going to... STEPHEN CHBOSKY Life is like an array of dishes,you may not like all and all may not be perfect but what we need to ... DELETE ACCOUNT Most of all, we remain focused on our Rock that never moves. CRAIG GROESCHEL It may well be that the world is denied miracle after miracle and triumph after triumph because we w... WILLIAM BARCLAY When it all comes down to it, though we may be accused of being coddled and cosseted, our conscience... JASMINE BAUCHAM Time is so important.'so spend time doing something that you love.' make the most of it and Let the ... NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed th... SAMUEL BECKETT If we become completely whole-hearted we will have love for all people and will seek in each person ... EBERHARD ARNOLD That is too long for a club of our stature. We need to put that right as soon as possible. We want t... ANDY GOODE I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES When we are hypnotized by the very presence of beauty it will not only feel good within but to the p... GARY F EVANS... I do think it's a big mistake to assume that creating this new big department is the be-all and end-... BILL CLINTON Cease to think of an impossibility and you will seize an opportunity for productivity. Excellence co... ISRAELMORE AYIVOR We are not wrong, perhaps, to be heedful of justice in the midst of a universe that heeds not at all... MAURICE MAETERLINCK Do you so love the truth and the right that you welcome, or at least submit willingly to, the idea o... GEORGE MACDONALD We dream that we're all different. The reality is that we're all not. ANTHONY T. HINCKS Not everyone knows how to be a good parent. Not everyone knows the right things to do or the right t... LETICIA RAE we sat there smoking cigarettes at 5 in the morning. CHARLES BUKOWSKI We believe because it gives us faith. It gives us the willingness to go through our day, to keep the... TARUN BETALA We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us -... FREDERICK BUECHNER Saying all that I need to do or should be doing is easy and it takes the spotlight away from what I ... MALTI BHOJWANI What a surprise it is to discover that you have never needed to strive to survive and be happy after... GINA LAKE For this is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul: that we seek here rest in those t... JULIAN OF NORWICH A couple of customers interrupted [...] who wanted to know if we had some YA book about ants and ali... SHAUN DAVID HUTCHINSON Above all, it is not necessary that we should have any unexpected, extraordinary experiences in medi... DIETRICH BONHOEFFER We all have our paths in life we are supposed to follow to find who we are supposed to be, but it... KYAN DOUGLAS How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the my... RAINER MARIA RILKE The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set ourselves. It is a continual... ROBERT FARRAR CAPON Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost memories? Then are we not ... NATHAN REESE MAHER The Biggest Threat to our Democracy, Freedoms and Future is Leadership that fosters and Appeases the... MICHAEL HARRIS All's well that carries on well AMIT ABRAHAM So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and tha... ANNE RICE Commemoration of Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, spiritual writer, 1893 In prayer we ... A. J. GOSSIP Continued from yesterday: The result of all this is that the Christian is a free man. It is here ... C. HAROLD DODD We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we hav... ERIC HOFFER The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis... OSCAR WILDE It may well be that we go in different phases in different places. There is no reason why we would h... HAZEL BLEARS Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening.... ALICE WALKER I wish that all nations may recover and retain their independence; that those which are overgrown ma... THOMAS JEFFERSON How do you know if something is real? That’s easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it g... C. JOYBELL C. 28. Feelings are neither right nor wrong. It's what you do with them that causes the problems. JAMES C. DOBSON
More Joan Didion
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it fro... JOAN DIDION I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die. JOAN DIDION Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting ... JOAN DIDION What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is go... JOAN DIDION Writers are always selling somebody out. JOAN DIDION Jesus JOAN DIDION I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, ... JOAN DIDION We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. JOAN DIDION When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not th... JOAN DIDION We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them att... JOAN DIDION To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have ev... JOAN DIDION The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soo... JOAN DIDION Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europ... JOAN DIDION A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the u... JOAN DIDION Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended a... JOAN DIDION We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we share... JOAN DIDION To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that ... JOAN DIDION Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. JOAN DIDION There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexua... JOAN DIDION The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect sp... JOAN DIDION I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. W... JOAN DIDION Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from whi... JOAN DIDION I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it. JOAN DIDION I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just ... JOAN DIDION We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate... JOAN DIDION It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism ... JOAN DIDION Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. JOAN DIDION Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. JOAN DIDION My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' Al... JOAN DIDION The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in yo... JOAN DIDION Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. JOAN DIDION Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only questio... JOAN DIDION I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find ... JOAN DIDION My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, an... JOAN DIDION When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusia... JOAN DIDION When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral... JOAN DIDION To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguitie... JOAN DIDION The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and iv... JOAN DIDION When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not ... JOAN DIDION To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth... is potentially to have everything... JOAN DIDION Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies t... JOAN DIDION Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which s... JOAN DIDION It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between wha... JOAN DIDION The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power fo... JOAN DIDION California: The west coast of Iowa. JOAN DIDION I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don't believe that anyone is looking out for m... JOAN DIDION I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good ... JOAN DIDION Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half... JOAN DIDION Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than m... JOAN DIDION You have to pick the places you don't walk away from. JOAN DIDION I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation t... JOAN DIDION I lead a very conventional life. I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a sou... JOAN DIDION A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. JOAN DIDION The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not sh... JOAN DIDION Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a p... JOAN DIDION Everything's going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose. JOAN DIDION It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That acade... JOAN DIDION People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have... JOAN DIDION I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I... JOAN DIDION Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someon... JOAN DIDION Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There w... JOAN DIDION In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season.... JOAN DIDION Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice... JOAN DIDION I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to... JOAN DIDION Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read A... JOAN DIDION The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language. JOAN DIDION That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out JOAN DIDION hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back. JOAN DIDION We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget JOAN DIDION That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out JOAN DIDION To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have ev... JOAN DIDION I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tel... JOAN DIDION [Outside, a ceiling of pearly gray clouds coalesced over Manhattan, and the apartment had grown dark... JOAN DIDION The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream. JOAN DIDION We tell ourselves stories, JOAN DIDION There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. JOAN DIDION [In her devastating new book,] The Year of Magical Thinking, ... cut loose any fixed idea I had ever... JOAN DIDION This one is really fantastic, ... It's not about grieving. It's about what happens when people die. JOAN DIDION I'm not sure I would have anyway, ... If I had been writing it at the time she died, that would have... JOAN DIDION It's always something minor. Some bit of information. Some interesting development. I think it hits ... JOAN DIDION A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera ... JOAN DIDION We tell ourselves stories in order to live, JOAN DIDION Life changes fast, ... Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it e... JOAN DIDION There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you, JOAN DIDION To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, sing... JOAN DIDION Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was... JOAN DIDION We were that generation called ''silent,'' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we s... JOAN DIDION I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the ma... JOAN DIDION That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing. JOAN DIDION I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose. JOAN DIDION And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and ... JOAN DIDION The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not sh... JOAN DIDION We tell ourselves stories in order to live. JOAN DIDION I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. JOAN DIDION The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not sh... JOAN DIDION I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lightin... JOAN DIDION To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self JOAN DIDION I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. JOAN DIDION Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.... JOAN DIDION Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. ... JOAN DIDION I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I d... JOAN DIDION You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever. JOAN DIDION The Year of Magical Thinking, JOAN DIDION Call me the author. JOAN DIDION I am sort of religious. But I don't believe in a personal God, ... I believe in geology. You can't b... JOAN DIDION I never had to finish sentences because he would finish them for me, ... I never got why. What was g... JOAN DIDION The shock of it was that this time, she had a lot of strength, ... Her husband and I assumed she'd o... JOAN DIDION Western Attitudes Toward Death. JOAN DIDION Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? JOAN DIDION That's something we have to feel out. It occurred to me to begin with, as a way of taking it a step ... JOAN DIDION I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it JOAN DIDION You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line. JOAN DIDION Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of ... JOAN DIDION They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for "typ... JOAN DIDION Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... I could make promises to myself and to other... JOAN DIDION But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human il... JOAN DIDION All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom w... JOAN DIDION Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price ... JOAN DIDION Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tri... JOAN DIDION I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody as... JOAN DIDION It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figur... JOAN DIDION I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find ... JOAN DIDION See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of w... JOAN DIDION It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happ... JOAN DIDION Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolesce... JOAN DIDION It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind o... JOAN DIDION …quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean tha... JOAN DIDION It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often ... JOAN DIDION It is the phenomenon somethings called "alienation from self." In its advanced stages, we no longer ... JOAN DIDION We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betr... JOAN DIDION I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fil... JOAN DIDION [O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction ... JOAN DIDION People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was o... JOAN DIDION ...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean... JOAN DIDION ...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we fi... JOAN DIDION I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find ... JOAN DIDION I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone&... JOAN DIDION New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all... JOAN DIDION I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel. JOAN DIDION A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind,... JOAN DIDION Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. JOAN DIDION Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. JOAN DIDION I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter. JOAN DIDION I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things go... JOAN DIDION I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things go... JOAN DIDION Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price. JOAN DIDION You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the s... JOAN DIDION I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political.... JOAN DIDION A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye. JOAN DIDION To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension... JOAN DIDION I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one. JOAN DIDION The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respec... JOAN DIDION It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentr... JOAN DIDION This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingl... JOAN DIDION We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line u... JOAN DIDION I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly. JOAN DIDION I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. JOAN DIDION My mother loved entertaining, and I've followed suit, so we have big celebrations for New Year, ... JOAN RIVERS When you look at the world, the world isn't just one palette. It's a beautiful rainbow, and ... JOAN SMALLS I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. JOAN MIRO I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking. JOAN RIVERS Forty for you, sixty for me. And equal partners we will be. JOAN RIVERS Being Jewish has always been important to me. I now have 6M tattooed on the inside of my left arm. I... JOAN RIVERS I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I'd look like without plastic surgery. JOAN RIVERS I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, 'Get the hell off my property... JOAN RIVERS I was smart enough to go through any door that opened. JOAN RIVERS I have no methods; all I do is accept people as they are. JOAN RIVERS Is Elizabeth Taylor fat? Her favorite food is seconds. JOAN RIVERS I'm always shocked when I get an invitation. People are always shocked when they see me at a par... JOAN RIVERS Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God's gift, that's why we call it the ... JOAN RIVERS I've had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware. JOAN RIVERS Life goes by fast. Enjoy it. Calm down. It's all funny. Next. Everyone gets so upset about the w... JOAN RIVERS I enjoy life when things are happening. I don't care if it's good things or bad things. That... JOAN RIVERS Fashion is part of our culture, and it's about more than just a pretty dress. JOAN SMALLS I was not an attractive child. When I didn't use my Girl Scouts uniform as a uniform, I used it ... JOAN RIVERS I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I'm not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death inte... JOAN BAEZ We used to wash our hair in buckets and survive on toasted sandwiches, chocolates and soup. JOAN GREENWOOD I left my family, and I left my brother and sister, and I went and lived my dream. I saw everybody, ... JOAN JETT When I came back to it, we amicably separated from Warner Bros. I just picked up where I left off, t... JOAN JETT Bulgaria is fascinating. Because it had been a Communist country until the mid-80s, so it had just r... JOAN CUSACK I'm a fiend for costume jewellery and have countless pairs of rhinestone or diamante earrings, w... JOAN COLLINS I love getting back to Wivenhoe. I get out of my wig, bustle and costume in three minutes flat at th... JOAN HICKSON Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try to give their best qualiti... JOAN BAEZ What is the biggest public forum in the United States? We were told it's the Super Bowl. The ad ... JOAN BLADES Reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes. JOAN LARSEN The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organiz... JOAN BAEZ When I finish dressing before a night out and have put on all the accessories, I usually look at mys... JOAN COLLINS I used to go over to Gene Kelly's house and play volleyball, and Paul Newman and Marlon Brando w... JOAN COLLINS Influence: What you think you have until you try to use it. JOAN WELSH Thank God we're living in a country where the sky's the limit, the stores are open late and you can ... JOAN RIVERS Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until y... JOAN ERICKSON Roache's statement after his acquittal was dignified but his supporters were angry. They demanded to... JOAN SMITH If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live wi... JOAN POWERS A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a... JOAN RIVERS A heart filled with anger has no room for love. JOAN LUNDEN Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never t... JOAN CRAWFORD Simple things bring infinite pleasure. Yet, it takes us a while to realize that. But once simple is ... JOAN MARQUES I've never yet met a man who could look after me. I don't need a husband. What I need is a wife. JOAN COLLINS If you're coasting, you're either losing momentum or else you're headed downhill. JOAN WELSH Because gratification of a desire leads to the temporary stilling of the mind and the experience of ... JOAN BORYSENKO