Joyce Johnson quotes:

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.