Joyce Johnson Quotations

I was in really bad shape. I don't remember a lot of it. But after I got out of there, I spent a week and a half in the hospital. Half of it in the intensive care unit.

Parents may think we expect something from them, ... but there aren't any expectations on our part; we just want to serve.

We were prepared to buy her clothes and make sure she had all her supplies for school, but her guardians said they didn't need anything, ... She seems to be quite happy.

It's good for seniors to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, ... We have a big promotion in Mason County Senior Citizen Center for seniors to eat five to seven serving of fruits and vegetables each day. That's what we try to do here each day.

In the age that I am, in my entire adult life that I have been lobbying for reproductive freedom--why does it seem like we're going so far backwards?

In a good literary memoir, you're basically rendering the essence of the experience. Whether someone is called Jane or Susan, who cares?

The Communist Workers Party had a racial and economic analysis that was all too true. We've seen this with what has happened with Hurricane Katrina.

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

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.

Nothing ever happened except God.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.