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d29b326
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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Joan Didion |
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c6e24de
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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Joan Didion |
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4eca0cf
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Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
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Joan Didion |
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51c6621
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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
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Joan Didion |
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5a412ea
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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storytelling
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Joan Didion |
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565517f
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Character -- the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life -- is the source from which self-respect springs.
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responsibility
life
self-respect
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Joan Didion |
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7b6eda0
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
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Joan Didion |
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9260c7f
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Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we wil..
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Joan Didion |
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6103289
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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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Joan Didion |
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e367278
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I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, fo..
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Joan Didion |
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47e3378
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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self-acceptance
innocence
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Joan Didion |
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0f6511e
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I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
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Joan Didion |
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2c51fe7
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quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach ..
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Joan Didion |
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117d0c6
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I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
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Joan Didion |
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5ba2ebc
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People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Joan Didion |
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032f521
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Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will..
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Joan Didion |
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7e3629e
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Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
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Joan Didion |
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5799c74
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Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
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time
work
whine
complain
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Joan Didion |
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cff8c84
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We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
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Joan Didion |
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994999d
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted..
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Joan Didion |
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b3d9028
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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.
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Joan Didion |
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2c62816
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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Joan Didion |
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ff913ec
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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.
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past
identity
personal-history
self
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Joan Didion |
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71f5a00
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People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. ..
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loss-of-faith
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Joan Didion |
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4599dc2
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The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
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Joan Didion |
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e122ce1
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You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember..
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Joan Didion |
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47ebc68
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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Joan Didion |
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2fc670a
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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writer
imagining
imagine
natural
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Joan Didion |
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eac47ef
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What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
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Joan Didion |
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f12ebad
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Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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Joan Didion |
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7efb220
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It is the phenomenon somethings called "alienation from self." In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out o..
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Joan Didion |
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1be10a6
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I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.
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need
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Joan Didion |
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49aa0f2
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Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doo..
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Joan Didion |
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4e1ef22
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It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to mak..
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self-reflection
self-image
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Joan Didion |
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5b9ec31
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I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and e..
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possibilities
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Joan Didion |
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a8c42d1
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In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.
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momentos
nostalgia
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Joan Didion |
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78c18d6
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.
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Joan Didion |
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a5cb4d1
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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messages
survive
imagine
survival
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Joan Didion |
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0b6ae0b
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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Joan Didion |
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bea353b
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We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.
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Joan Didion |
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5de14fb
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I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.
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love
partnership
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Joan Didion |
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af1568f
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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.
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Joan Didion |
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ab9308f
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We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.
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Joan Didion |
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6984012
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One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing."
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Joan Didion |