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56d0207
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You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing--beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code--what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil."
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Joan Didion |
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f071787
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But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, m..
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Joan Didion |
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da6ab2c
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Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter,
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Joan Didion |
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9cc58ea
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That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.
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Joan Didion |
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ad742f6
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Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.
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Joan Didion |
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7ae82f8
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There is an airport in Hermosillo, and Hermosillo is only eighty-five miles about Guaymas, but to fly is to miss the point. The point is to become disoriented, shriven, by the heat and the deceptive perspectives and the oppressive sense of carrion. The road shimmers. The eyes want to close.
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Joan Didion |
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06479dd
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I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever is in the air.
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Joan Didion |
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ace2d39
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The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.
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Joan Didion |
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c52638e
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It is three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon and 105deg and the air so thick with smog that the dusty palm trees loom up with a sudden and rather attractive mystery.
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Joan Didion |
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285d813
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They worry a great deal about 'responding to one another with beauty and tenderness,' and their response to one another is in fact so tender that an afternoon at the school tends to drift perilously into the never-ever.
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Joan Didion |
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685b8f1
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So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences.
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Joan Didion |
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4f67e8f
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It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.
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Joan Didion |
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c448c6f
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I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one 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 to anyone before.
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Joan Didion |
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47f018e
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Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.
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Joan Didion |
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f952d6a
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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 expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later - because I did not belong there, did not come from there - but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.
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Joan Didion |
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068f5b1
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I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
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Joan Didion |
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51c880e
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Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.
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Joan Didion |
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9199998
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The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardeni..
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Joan Didion |
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c5b6cd0
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Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen.
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Joan Didion |
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28ca626
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What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?
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Joan Didion |
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53db8f6
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I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be.
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Joan Didion |
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7706d47
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I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a "specialist." He wrote down a psychiatrist's name and address for me, but I did not g..
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Joan Didion |
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edd9707
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They come from all over, and they are on the average very young, very earnest, and not very much in touch with the larger scene, less refugees from it than children who do not quite apprehend it.
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Joan Didion |
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7ab6f18
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We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.
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letting-go-of-the-past
letting-go
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Joan Didion |
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770510d
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The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people," she said. "The hardest is with one."
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Joan Didion |
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da377f0
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This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the ..
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Joan Didion |
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ff987c6
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Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.
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Joan Didion |
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a690b5e
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I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
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Joan Didion |
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7e8bafd
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I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $ 1,000 a month. "Someday you will," she said lazily. "Someday it all comes." There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorc..
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Joan Didion |
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11c7bc5
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As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs.
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Joan Didion |
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a5bea7b
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We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.
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Joan Didion |
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a14e4cc
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We went to get away from ourselves, and the way to do that is to drive, down through Nogales some day when the pretty green places pall and all that will move the imagination is some place difficult, some desert.
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Joan Didion |
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eb2f37b
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The beaches at Malibu are neither white nor as wide as the beach at Carmel. The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks. For these and other reasons Malibu tends to astonish and disappoint those who have never seen it, and yet its very name remains, in the imagination of people all over the world, a kind of shorthand for the easy life. I had not before 1971 and ..
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Joan Didion |
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99c600f
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what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention.
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Joan Didion |
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aa6eef0
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I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.
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Joan Didion |
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2fa3e62
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It is not exactly any of these things. It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolently "democratic," flattened out, mediocre and "open" and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn. It is the arch..
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Joan Didion |
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2ff87b1
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We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be ..
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Joan Didion |
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6d313ed
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it is a network kept alive by people whose instincts tell them that if they do not keep moving at night on the desert they will lose all reason.
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Joan Didion |
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5e4960a
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What I can hear are occasional coyotes and a constant chorus of "Baby the Rain Must Fall" from the jukebox in the Snake Room next door, and if I were also to hear those dying voices, those Midwestern voices drawn to this lunar country for some unimaginable atavistic rites, rock of ages cleft for me, I think I would lose my own reason. Every now and then I imagine I hear a rattlesnake, but my husband says that it is a faucet, a paper rustlin..
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Joan Didion |
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8f33eef
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My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as "Joan's husband." Marriage is the classic betrayal."
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Joan Didion |
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95d395a
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Marriage is the classic betrayal
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Joan Didion |
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71abeab
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Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers?
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Joan Didion |
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6918aa1
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January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past.
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Joan Didion |
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8f1496a
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To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
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Joan Didion |