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11d9432
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Tell me what matters," BZ said. Nothing," Maria said."
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Joan Didion |
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86f0f0f
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I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The cond..
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fear
multiple-sclerosis
uncertainty
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Joan Didion |
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16265aa
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And except on a certain kind of winter evening--six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that--except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had..
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new-york
nostalgia
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Joan Didion |
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77f78a3
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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 hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
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Joan Didion |
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90707fa
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The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tajunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquility.
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Joan Didion |
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ed19962
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The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.
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Joan Didion |
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114cd42
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It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano's situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.
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Joan Didion |
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703aff5
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I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: "I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.'" And even a third way: "It doesn't present as pain," I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer."
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Joan Didion |
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8fa3564
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It was the kind of Sunday to make one ache for Monday morning.
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sunday
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Joan Didion |
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c31e36a
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I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.
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Joan Didion |
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67288b4
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My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: .
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Joan Didion |
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297e8b3
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When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.
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Joan Didion |
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1db21da
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All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife's inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, ab..
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Joan Didion |
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eeb64e2
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Joan Didion |
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8150788
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The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it i..
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Joan Didion |
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f2ef9f2
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Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us.
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Joan Didion |
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594accd
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I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead. During which the question remained open. During which the denouement had yet to play out. During which the last scene played did not necessarily need to be played in the ICU overlooking the E..
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Joan Didion |
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31b3503
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Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon.
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Joan Didion |
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db29d70
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You talk crazy any more and I'll leave. Leave. For Christ's sake leave. She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. All right. Don't, he would say then. Don't. Why do you say those things. Why do you fight. He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. To find out if you're alive.
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Joan Didion |
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c019e48
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One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.
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Joan Didion |
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792350f
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To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether..
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Joan Didion |
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0fa7317
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The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution... 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.
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Joan Didion |
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51da757
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Once she was born, I was never not afraid.
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Joan Didion |
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25db4cf
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He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.
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Joan Didion |
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88bbc71
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No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely.
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Joan Didion |
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361a9b8
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A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.
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fountain-of-youth
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Joan Didion |
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a0e2cec
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here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) 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 meaninglessness itself.
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Joan Didion |
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eec6e16
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I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.
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Joan Didion |
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f6efada
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Information was control.
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Joan Didion |
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2cd3edf
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In was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.
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Joan Didion |
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112886a
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What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.
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politics
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Joan Didion |
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a598532
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When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.
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Joan Didion |
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15eb164
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Quintana's christening was in 1966, this Christian Dior show was two years later, 1968: 1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States but they were for women who presented themselves a certain way the same time. It was a way of looking, it was a way of being. It was a period. What became of that way of looking, that way of being, that time, that period? What became of the women sm..
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Joan Didion |
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5e86fa8
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the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
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stress
effort
childhood
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Joan Didion |
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e068c7b
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We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees. We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.
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Joan Didion |
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2d1b027
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I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative,
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Joan Didion |
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860968e
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the contemporary trend was "to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened."
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Joan Didion |
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12ff13e
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Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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Joan Didion |
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a1bd446
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As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or..
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marxism
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Joan Didion |
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fd48d9e
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Raised to believe that her life would be, as her great-grandmother's was said to have been, one ceaseless round of fixed and settled principles, aims, motives, and activity, she could sometimes think of nothing to do but walk downtown, check out the Bon Marche for clothes she could not afford, buy a cracked crab for dinner and take a taxi home.
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Joan Didion |
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77c69c9
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The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.
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Joan Didion |
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18b3687
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En epocas dificiles, me habian dicho desde nina, lee, aprende, preparate, recurre a la literatura.
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Joan Didion |
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081247a
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I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters
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Joan Didion |
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f447ad9
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He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child's whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in..
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relationships
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Joan Didion |