Author: Joan Didion

Cites

• W. B. Yeats (1)
  • IN: We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006) NULL, American
    EPIGRAPH: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
    FROM: The Second Coming, (1920), NULL, NULL
• Peggy Lee (2)
  • IN: We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006) Essays, American
    EPIGRAPH: I learnt courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein and Cary Grant
    FROM: NULL, (None), Conversation, US
  • IN: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: “I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant.”
    FROM: NULL, (1961), NULL, US
• Robert Lowell (1)
  • IN: Run River (1963) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: All night I've held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad -- its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye -- and dragged me home alive...
    FROM: Man and Wife, (1959), Poem, US
• Peck (1)
  • IN: Run River (1963) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: ...the real Eldorado is still further on.
    FROM: Peck's 1837 New Guide to the West, (1837), NULL, US

Cited by

• Scott Westerfeld (1)
  • IN: Afterworlds (2014) Fiction, Young Adult, American
    EPIGRAPH: We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
    FROM: The White Album, (1979), Essay, US
• Daniel Riley (1)
  • IN: Fly Me (2017) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
    FROM: Notes from a Native Daughter, (1965), Essay, US