27 Quotes by Joyce Johnson

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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...