Ally > Ally's Quotes

“What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.”
― Joan Didion

“The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.”
― Joan Didion, Where I Was From

“I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”
― Joan Didion

“Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere”
― Joan Didion

“I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: "I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.'"
And even a third way: "It doesn't present as pain," I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters:
that is the only question.
If you would not feel
the horrible burden of Time
weighing on your shoulders
and crushing you to the earth,
be drunken continually.

Drunken with what?
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken.

And if sometimes,
on the stairs of a palace,
or on the green side of a ditch,
or in the dreary solitude of your own room,
you should awaken
and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you,
ask of the wind,
or of the wave,
or of the star,
or of the bird,
or of the clock,
of whatever flies,
or sighs,
or rocks,
or sings,
or speaks,
ask what hour it is;
and the wind,
wave,
star,
bird,
clock will answer you:
"It is the hour to be drunken!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“A multitude of small delights constitute happiness”
― Charles Baudelaire

“There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“But the true voyagers are only those who leave
Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,
They never turn aside from their fatality
And without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk. ”
― Charles Baudelaire

“It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!”
― Charles Baudelaire

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.”
― Oscar Wilde