Quotes from Joyce Johnson

Nothing ever happened except God.

Everyone knew in the 1950s why a girl from a nice family left home. The meaning of her theft of herself from her parents was clear to all - as well as what she'd be up to in that room of her own.

Fame and success put tremendous demands on people. It robs them of their necessary privacy and anonymity. That's hard for even healthy people to deal with.

If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it until you got it right.

I believe in the curative powers of love as the English believe in tea or Catholics believe in the Miracle of Lourdes.

We tend to make up the people we fall in love with

I became intent on saving him through showing him that he was loved.

I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.

If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it until you got it right.

We tend to make up the people we fall in love with

I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him--they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.

And isn't it amazing that suicide is illegal when society is so indifferent to human life?

In the 1950s, there was a sense that literature and writing had a burning importance — that you could write a book or paint a painting and change the world. That kind of faith seems to be lacking now. Literature has been pushed toward the sidelines of [modern day] culture. There isn't that sense of centrality or permanence to the written word — everything seems more disposable.

Still, I wouldn't have turned back if given the choice. At twenty-one, I felt I had gone to the bottom and floated up; I had the lightness of feeling there was nothing left to lose...

You don't know what narrow lives girls have, how few real adventures there are for them; misadventures, yes, like abortions and little men following them in subways, but seldom anything like seeing ships at night.

There's a school of wisdom about love that says the surest way to lose someone is to hold on to them too tightly -- as demonstrated over and over again by the split-ups of lovers, but also by parents and children. Although there it's more complicated by far. Lovers, initially strangers, become strangers again; the tie between parent and child pulls and twists for a lifetime, taking on the strangest forms.

If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it till you got it right.

the thing was, not to go home.

A lot of artists don't survive, do they? You work very hard and finally you get what you want and it destroys you.

If you want to do creative work, there are tremendous sacrifices involved, and tremendous financial sacrifices too. It requires dedication and solitude.