Joyce Johnson Quotes & Sayings

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. — Joyce Johnson

Legend adheres to artists whose deaths seem the corollaries of their works. — Joyce Johnson

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. — Joyce Johnson

I kept learning about being a widow in little, distant flashes. I saw that after a long while, if you had no one to touch you, you might eventually become someone who went to beauty parlors and paid to have strangers do your hair. You'd pay for the sensation of it, the hands of another human being pouring warmth on you, gently smoothing, stroking. You'd close your eyes and lean back into those hands and your face might have exactly that look, I thought.

Life just goes on, you see, any old way it can. Even the dead can't interrupt the flow. — Joyce Johnson

Rebels defy the rules of society, risking everything to retain their humanity. If the world Atwood depicts is chilling, if 'God is losing,' the only hope for optimism is a vision that includes the inevitability of human struggle against the prevailing order. — Joyce Johnson

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

Nothing ever happened except God. — Joyce Johnson

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

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. — Joyce Johnson

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

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. — Joyce Johnson

What if you lived your entire life completely without urgency? You went to classes, you ate your meals, on Saturday nights a boy you didn't love took you to the movies; now and then you actually had a conversation with someone. The rest of the time -the hours that weren't accounted for-you spent waiting for something to happen to you; when you were particularly desperate, you went out looking for it. — Joyce Johnson

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... — Joyce Johnson

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. — Joyce Johnson

Now your return has started to be real. I've always been convinced that until you were in the door that you'd never get here and have always felt I'd never see you again when I saw you off, which is why I wept. And I always used to half dread your coming, because it meant the beginning of your going away and every moment that you were here seemed terribly fraught somehow, painful... I've never had such a sense of the rush of time, and yet the weeks that you were here seemed very, very long, and when I was alone again, it seemed as if I'd been away for a year. Strange... And now it will be different - there'll be more ease between us, I think... Well, I wonder what you think about all this... I used to doubt whether you knew anything about me... but perhaps now I think you've known everything all along. Didn't think you were as wise as you are now, but your perfect knowledge of yourself and everything around you shook me up and astounded me. — Joyce Johnson

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

Media saturation is probably very destructive to art. New movements get overexposed and exhausted before they have a chance to grow, and they turn to ashes in a short time. Some degree of time and obscurity is often very necessary to artists. — Joyce Johnson

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