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fd2f08a
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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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ad2e7f8
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Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... 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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dbdd7e1
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Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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Joan Didion |
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531f769
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But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.
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Joan Didion |
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0099f12
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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. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves."
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Joan Didion |
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ebf604e
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nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.
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meaningless
void
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Joan Didion |
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60a01ee
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Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.
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Joan Didion |
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f929c36
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Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. "A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty," Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. "But one no longer has the right to say so aloud."
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Joan Didion |
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f2df357
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When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.
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Joan Didion |
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eaaead8
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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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criticism
reviewers
film
movie
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Joan Didion |
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e169e88
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It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with..
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joan didion |
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7721535
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They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for "typeheads," Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips - their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children ..
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Joan Didion |
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78ec928
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words ..
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Joan Didion |
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4674ca0
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It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
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Joan Didion |
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4ef4853
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I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should.
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Joan Didion |
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08341e8
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Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice
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Joan Didion |
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3673e92
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Time is the school in which we learn.
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Joan Didion |
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e37929a
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We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings."
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happiness
love
health
children
luck
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Joan Didion |
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d748616
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After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave. Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.
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Joan Didion |
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e9e3bb2
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Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? 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? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something u..
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howard-hughes
joan-didion
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Joan Didion |
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191b487
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When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
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mortality
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Joan Didion |
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342a841
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Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.
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depression
anxiety
alcoholism
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Joan Didion |
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132f4f6
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It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?
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eccentric
southern
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Joan Didion |
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6b85892
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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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memories
death
preparation
parents
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Joan Didion |
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34e6e71
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I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.
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opportunity
future
hope
new-life
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Joan Didion |
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f95879e
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I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.
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Joan Didion |
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6a57e41
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I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
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writing
truth
inspirational
talent
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Joan Didion |
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db7a26f
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Persons under the shock of genuine affliction are not only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, sleepless.
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Joan Didion |
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bd56a20
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All I knew was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
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Joan Didion |
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7d5ad16
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I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos 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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Joan Didion |
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de78d63
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think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. "It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. ..
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Joan Didion |
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0fc8c1d
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I promised myself that I would maintain momentum. "Maintain momentum" was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown. In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it. In fact I had no idea what it was."
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Joan Didion |
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1705a58
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This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning."
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foreboding
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Joan Didion |
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753cc63
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I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies.
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Joan Didion |
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b51b831
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Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right. As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone "chose" you, what does that tell you? Doesn't it tell you that you were available to be "chosen"? Doesn't it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world? The ones who "chose" you? And the other who didn't? Are we beginning to see how the word "abandonm..
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Joan Didion |
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a87bc9e
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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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7eece8c
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For forty years I saw myself thru John's eyes. I did not age.
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Joan Didion |
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a358533
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Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.
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Joan Didion |
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4cb55ca
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She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her,
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Joan Didion |
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bac61d9
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Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear abo..
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Joan Didion |
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573a65b
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Ten watercolors were made from that star.
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Joan Didion |
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b95d353
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The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness.... To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it.
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Joan Didion |
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4a2ea46
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These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.
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Joan Didion |
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1b73854
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Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems; all of these are fundamentally influenced by brain function and neurotransmitters.
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Joan Didion |