The White Album Quotes
"We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
"In other words I had skirts, jerseys, leotards, pullover sweater, shoes, stockings, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil, mohair throw, typewriter, legal pads, pens, files and a house key, but I didn’t know what time it was."
"This may be a parable, either of my life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself."
"The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."
"Writing had helped him, he said, to 'reflect on experience and see what it means.'"
"Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood."
"Grace was 'unfinished,' and always would be, which was its point."
"This came to my attention as an odd and unsettling development."
"One thinks of Gatsby, coming up against the East."
"The apparent ease of California life is an illusion."
"Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control."
"Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable."
"The Getty tells us that we were never any better than we are and will never be any better than we were."
"Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked, the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade."
"Things 'happen' in motion pictures. There is always a resolution, always a strong cause-effect dramatic line."
"To perceive the world in those terms is to assume an ending for every social scenario."
"Things did change, but in the end it was not they who made things change."
"Nobody ever so much as mentioned that when you say 'I do,' what you are doing is not, as you thought, vowing your eternal love, but rather subscribing to a whole system of rights, obligations and responsibilities that may well be anathema to your most cherished beliefs."
"The power of sex is just an oppressive myth, no longer to be feared."
"To ask the obvious—why she did not get herself another gynecologist, another job, why she did not get out of bed and turn off the television set—was to join this argument at its own spooky level."
"To believe in 'the greater good' is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension."
"Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."
"I guess he wasn’t a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage."
"A flower touches almost everyone’s heart. A red hill doesn’t touch everyone’s heart."
"I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t."
"To understand what the Royal is now you must first understand what it was."
"I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do."
"This is a community whose notable excesses include virtually none of the flesh or spirit: heterosexual adultery is less easily tolerated than respectably settled homosexual marriages or well-managed liaisons between middle-aged women."
"The action itself is the art form, and is described in aesthetic terms: 'A very imaginative deal,' they say, or, 'He writes the most creative deals in the business.'"
"The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise."
"People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made. But if you actually tell them anything, you find...they never see the ventriloquist for the doll."
"Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place."
"Reviewing motion pictures, like reviewing new cars, may or may not be a useful consumer service."
"It was a long time before I began thinking mechanistically enough to accept migraine for what it was: something with which I would be living, the way some people live with diabetes."
"The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact."
"Where were we heading. The set for this discussion was always the same: a cozy oasis of wicker and ferns in the wilderness of cables and cameras and Styrofoam coffee cups that was the actual studio."
"I began to see America as my own, a child’s map over which my child and I could skim and light at will."
"They are toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes, profound equalizers, the perfect fusion of the profit motive and the egalitarian ideal."
"I watched her press the buttons one by one, transfixed by the vast darkness each tiny bulb illumined."
"The mountains loom behind every image I remember, and perhaps are themselves the connection."
"In the end I bought not The New York Times at all but two straw hats at Liberty House, four bottles of nail enamel at Woolworth’s, and a toaster, on sale at Sears."
"The turbines roared. Transformers hummed. The gratings on which we stood vibrated. We watched a hundred-ton steel shaft plunging down to that place where the water was."
"I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the date the dam was dedicated."
"All that afternoon he sat at the piano and all that afternoon he played 'Blue Room' and he never got it right."
"The idea of having had a 'date' for a football lunch now seems to me so exotic as to be almost czarist."
"The historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood."
"We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal."
"I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults."
"What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace."
"Its principal residential street, the Pacific Coast Highway, is quite literally a highway."
"Dick Haddock's business for all these twenty-six years has been that of a professional lifeguard for the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches."
"It seemed to me a curious, almost beatified career choice, electing to save those in peril upon the sea forty hours a week."
"We don't know how long they'll live. They haven't been bred under protected conditions that long."
"We were standing in a sea of orchids, an extravagance of orchids, and he had given me an armful of blossoms from his own cattleyas to take to my child, more blossoms maybe than in all of Madrid."
"In fact this was a way of life I had not expected to find in Malibu."