“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”
Source: The Year of Magical Thinking
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Joan Didion 48
American writer 1934Related quotes
Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 80
“Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.”
“Snow White” [play], p. 324.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)
Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking
Foreword to The Beach Book by Gloria Steinem (1963); reprinted in Galbraith's A View from the Stands (1986)
Context: Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
On the "death of literature"
Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)
Paraphrased variant: We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Harvard address (2008)
