After Henry Quotes

“At nineteen I had wanted to write. At forty I still wanted to write, and nothing that had happened in the years between made me any more certain that I could.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, 8 million stories in the naked city; 8 million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city's actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry

“The notion that the interests of the 'gentleman' and the 'rowdy' might be at odds did not intrude: then as now, the preferred narrative wanted to veil actual conflict, to cloud the extent to which the condition of being rich was predicated upon the continued neediness of the working class, to confirm the responsible stewardship of 'the gentleman' and to forestall the possibility of a self-conscious, or politicized, proletariat.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry

“improvised”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“We love New York, the narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“It was only within the transforming narrative of “contrasts” that both the essential criminality of the city and its related absence of civility could become points of pride, evidence of “energy”: if you could make it here you could make it anywhere, hello sucker, get smart.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“Some New York stories involving young middle-class white women do not make it to the editorial pages, or even necessarily to the front pages.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of “real life”.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“Do this in remembrance of me: the solution, then, or so such pervasive fantasies suggested, was to partake of the symbolic body and blood of The Jogger, whose idealization was by this point complete, and was rendered, significantly, in details stressing her “difference”, or superior class. The Jogger was someone who wore, according to Newsday, “a light gold chain around her slender neck” as well as, according to the News, a “modest” gold ring and “a thin sheen” of lipstick. The Jogger was someone who would not, according to the Post, “even dignify her alleged attackers with a glance.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“There were, early on, certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well handled by the press.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies,” Yusef Salaam’s mother reminded readers of the Amsterdam News.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“In other words she was wrenched, even as she hung between death and life and later between insentience and sentience, into New York’s ideal sister, daughter, Bacharach bride: a young woman of conventional middle-class privilege and promise whose situation was such that many people tended to overlook the fact that the state’s case against the accused was not invulnerable.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“the favored victim in the tabloid headline . . . was young, white, middle class and ‘attractive’.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“The words “USA Today” were heard quite a bit during the first few months of the new, faster format, as were “New Coke” and “Michael Dukakis”.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“the details gave the tone of the situation, the subtext without which the text could not be understood, and sharing this subtext with the reader was the natural tendency of reporters who, because of the nature of both the paper on which they worked and the city in which it was published, tended not to think of themselves as insiders.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“people whose names would tell a different story, although not necessarily to a different hundred people.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why. She was never an idealist, and this pleased no one. She was tainted by survival. She came back from the other side with a story no one wanted to hear, a dispiriting account of a situation in which delusion and incompetence were pitted against delusion and incompetence of another kind, and in the febrile rhythms of San Francisco in the midseventies it seemed a story devoid of high notes.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“Life with these people had the distorted logic of dreams, and Patricia Hearst seems to have accepted it with the wary acquiescence of the dreamer. Any face could turn against her. Any move could prove lethal.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“On a psychiatric test administered while she was in custody she completed the sentence “Most men ...” with the words “... are assholes”.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“History is context.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“This is in fact the kind of story we expect to hear about our elected officials. We not only expect them to use other nations as changeable scrims in the theater of domestic politics but encourage them to do so.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“Kara Dukakis, one of the candidate’s daughters, had at that moment emerged from the 737. “You’d have a beer with him?”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process”, or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals,”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as “anecdotal”.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays

“What these men represented was not “the West” but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities precisely because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.”
― Joan Didion, After Henry: Essays