“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 Didion48
American writer 1934Related quotes
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Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 80
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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.
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On the "death of literature"
Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)
Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series
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)
