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59404f6
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The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself," a novel "imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others."
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Joan Didion |
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17529a0
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Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look "right" to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places."
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Joan Didion |
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d44e491
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Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was "This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy." That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory."
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war
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Joan Didion |
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0ef3f4a
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Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.
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Joan Didion |
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af7b5db
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It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.
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Joan Didion |
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89ea778
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the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.
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Joan Didion |
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3e45dc8
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They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.
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Joan Didion |
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3c00ca5
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We all remember what we need to remember.
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Joan Didion |
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9dc1bac
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There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
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Joan Didion |
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08998eb
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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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ead5fb8
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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.
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Joan Didion |
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c2916d7
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Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
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Joan Didion |
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a8a67e9
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About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.
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Joan Didion |
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8dfa3b6
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This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their (it now seems) entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in toher words the pauperization of California, had in fact begun at the time Americans first entered the state, took what they could, and, abetted by the native weekness for boosterism, set about selling the rest.
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Joan Didion |
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6b2b92b
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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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c585924
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The death of a parent, he wrote, "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago." --
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Joan Didion |
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aff1729
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I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.
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joan-didion
social-science
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Joan Didion |
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1a93866
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I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.
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charlotte-douglas
didion
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Joan Didion |
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00d7fc8
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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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a4bf19a
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This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
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Joan Didion |
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5f99686
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I am what I am. To look for 'reasons' is beside the point.
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Joan Didion |
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cc84b8e
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their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need."
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Joan Didion |
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054158f
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I put the word "diagnosis" in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a "diagnosis" led to a "cure," or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility."
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diagnosis
medicine
health
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Joan Didion |
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34e7a71
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I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car. I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.
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Joan Didion |
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89bf17a
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Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.
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Joan Didion |
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93843bb
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Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?
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Joan Didion |
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a73bf09
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Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden."
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Joan Didion |
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ecf7e87
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Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
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Joan Didion |
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1d20af2
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You couldn't pay for her hats,' her father, a ship's captain, had told her suitors by way of discouragement, and perhaps they had all been discouraged but my grandfather, an innocent from the Georgetown Divide who read books.
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Joan Didion |
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a7fb4ec
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In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.
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west
south
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Joan Didion |
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8abd1a3
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Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After
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Joan Didion |
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6bc454d
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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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ef0afe3
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We had gone with David and Jean Halberstam to see the Lakers play the Knicks. David had gotten seats through the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern. The Lakers won. Rain had been sluicing down the glass beyond the escalator. "It's good luck, an omen, a great way to start this trip," I remembered John saying. He did not mean the good seats and he did not mean the Laker win and he did not mean the rain, he meant we were doing something we d..
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Joan Didion |
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3211480
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I sat by the window and watched the ice floes on the Hudson and thought about the sentence. It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making. It was not the kind of sentence, if you had written it, you would want wrong, but neither was it the kind of sentence, if that was the way you had written it, you would want changed. How had he written it? What did he have in mind? How would he want it? The decision was left to me. ..
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Joan Didion |
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0d74ea7
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Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
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Joan Didion |
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1f96880
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About Georgia O'Keeffe) At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girs' school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care. At twenty-four she left ..
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Joan Didion |
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461d022
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I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.
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Joan Didion |
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0317205
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sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain." Tightness in the throat."
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Joan Didion |
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767d5e3
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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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aae2e3e
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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
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Joan Didion |
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41ec0d2
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I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of "sin"-this sense that it was possible to go "too far", and that many people were doing it-this was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical ten..
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california
los-angeles
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Joan Didion |
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0db1b60
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Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.
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Joan Didion |
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eed58ca
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Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations.
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Joan Didion |
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9ff1260
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The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state.
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Joan Didion |