"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."
"Jack Kerouac seems to have been preoccupied with the question of duality from a very young age. He seemed to feel that there was more than one person inside him. Indeed he would veer from friendly, open and so on to someone who was angry. In a way, there was a swing also between his American self and what he later called his Franco-American older brother. There was a swing between the deeply introverted part of himself and the person he became out in the world, having to act in an extroverted way."
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More quotes by Joyce Johnson
"Nothing ever happened except God."
"I believe in the curative powers of love as the English believe in tea or Catholics believe in the Miracle of Lourdes."
"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."
"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."