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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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7df8257
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Anthony Lewis had written in The New York Times in September of 1975, "only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason."
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Joan Didion |
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e26935e
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The search for conspiracy," Anthony Lewis had written in The New York Times in September of 1975, "only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason."
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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 |
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e94b8b7
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To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening.
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Joan Didion |
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0e44cfb
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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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db666eb
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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.
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Joan Didion |
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de5126f
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The second kind of grief was "complicated grief," which was also known in the literature as "pathological bereavement" and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another." --
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Joan Didion |
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787307d
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Doliul e diferit. Doliul nu stie ce-i distanta. Durerea vine in valuri, paroxisme, revelatii subite care-ti taie genunchii, iti iau vederea si iti tulbura curgerea zilelor.
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Joan Didion |
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df48a3d
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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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993eb63
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We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.
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fate
meaningless
silent-generation
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Joan Didion |
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f048f22
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De ce trebuie sa ai mereu dreptate, imi spunea el. N-a inteles vreodata ca in mintea mea n-aveam niciodata dreptate.
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Joan Didion |
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4062bf8
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Doliul se dovedeste a fi un loc pe care il cunoastem doar atunci cand ajungem la el. [...] Nu putem sti dinainte despre faptul nesfarsitei absente care urmeaza (si aici sta esenta deosebirii intre doliul imaginat de noi si cel real), golul, opusul extrem al sensului, succesiunea inexorabila de momente in timpul carora ne vom confrunta cu experienta zadarniciei insesi.
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Joan Didion |
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a1ee571
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De fiecare data aceste rugaminti pentru prezenta lui nu au facut decat sa-mi intareasca constiinta tacerii definitive care ne-a despartit.
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Joan Didion |
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9a92a67
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Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went "but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me," and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. 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 evid..
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Joan Didion |
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c0ef4dd
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
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Joan Didion |