Quotes from book
Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Name: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Author: Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction .

“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Source: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Source: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Source: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Source: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.”

Joan Didion book Slouching Towards Bethlehem

"The Howard Hughes Underground," http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=7&sid=e10e8a49-3c75-4cb4-8d00-c35bb5bdf29a@sessionmgr4001 The Saturday Evening Post (23 August 1967) <br class="br"> "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38," http://books.google.com/books?id=_pgrUFe9Fh8C&q=%22Americans+are+uneasy+with+their+possessions+guilty+about+power+all+of+which+is+difficult+for+Europeans+to+perceive+because+they+are+themselves+so+truly+materialistic+so+versed+in+the+uses+of+power%22&pg=PA71#v=onepage Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)