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77e6cee
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Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But its really God -- playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven -- shattering stained glass -- playing a gigantic organ -- thundering on the keys -- perfect harmony -- perfect joy.
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Joan Didion |
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0946bf0
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I went to Newport not long ago, to see the great stone fin-de-siecle "cottages" in which certain rich Americans once summered. The places loom still along Bellevue Avenue and Cliff Walk, one after another, silk curtains frayed but gargoyles intact, monuments to something beyond themselves; houses built, clearly, to some transcendental point. No one had made clear to me exactly what that point was."
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Joan Didion |
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a17a26b
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Let me tell you what it is like out here tonight. Stories travel at night on the desert. Someone gets in his pickup and drives a couple of hundred miles for a beer, and he carries news of what is happening, back wherever he came from. Then he drives another hundred miles for another beer, and passes along stories from the last place as well as from the one before; it is a network kept alive by people whose instincts tell them that if they d..
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Joan Didion |
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b988b15
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I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.
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identity
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Joan Didion |
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041e0aa
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In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect. The effect is lively and avaricious and intensely self-absorbed, a tone not uncommon in colonial cities, and the principal reas..
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Joan Didion |
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c2bd4d3
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And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments..
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Joan Didion |
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4247ba8
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it [...]
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Joan Didion |
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b1ec50a
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I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen.
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Joan Didion |
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223ecd3
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Out under the pepper trees the boys from the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of tequila for one dollar American, but it was inside the cavernous empty commissary where the talent sat around, the reasons for the exercise, all sitting around the big table picking at huevos con queso and Carta Blanca beer.
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Joan Didion |
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9193152
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I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?
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Joan Didion |
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2a80fc5
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Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.
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Joan Didion |
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e7a9e52
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One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of 'privilege'? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity?
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Joan Didion |
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292ce31
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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.
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Joan Didion |
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af1705b
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The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.
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Joan Didion |
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dc2f992
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Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.
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Joan Didion |
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e5eed19
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Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O'Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove
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Joan Didion |
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02761cf
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I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
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Joan Didion |
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1eb7e6e
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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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55cd510
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pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again.
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Joan Didion |
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d03b636
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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." There"
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Joan Didion |
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4723717
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Bringing him back" had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. "Seeing it clearly" did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need. I" --
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Joan Didion |
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540e2f9
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What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They ..
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Joan Didion |
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b6cb26c
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In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.
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Joan Didion |
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d1d6ecf
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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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edd6c94
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Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
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living
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Joan Didion |
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9f2d5d4
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After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire. - Donald Rumsfeld in Year of Magical Thinking
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Joan Didion |
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f8cc1b4
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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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Joan Didion |
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2307eeb
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As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only
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Joan Didion |
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ca78c42
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.
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morality
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Joan Didion |
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ecc1b5b
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Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored:
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Joan Didion |
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e8a350f
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confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred,
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Joan Didion |
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1c43b22
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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.
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Joan Didion |
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8605cb1
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In the midst of life we are in death,
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Joan Didion |
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28861c5
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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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eb115d6
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear>
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Joan Didion |
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3a25522
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Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.
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Joan Didion |
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6bf7497
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Sonora
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Joan Didion |
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a15916d
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At a point during the summer it occurred to me that I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart.
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Joan Didion |
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87bc451
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Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. "I feel it's insane," he says, and his voice drops. "This chick tells me there's no meaning to life but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it's..
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Joan Didion |
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0e9a43a
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If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die?
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Joan Didion |
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66e839e
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Just an ordinary day. "And then--gone."
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Joan Didion |
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201e49d
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The bereaved must be urged to "sit in a sunny room," preferably one with an open fire."
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Joan Didion |
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7bdc345
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see the question now as the equivalent of a cry of helpless rage, another way of saying How could this have happened when everything was normal.
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Joan Didion |
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59759a2
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Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already at the threatening point, and none have the right to feel hurt if they are told they can neither be of use or be received. At such a time, to some people companionship is a comfort, others shrink from their dearest friends.
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Joan Didion |