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5681a53
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or amended and saved at 1:08 p.m. that afternoon
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Joan Didion |
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2dfee80
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Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. 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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49cf947
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Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship's a little truer That's where the West begins.
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Joan Didion |
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1b25360
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As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
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Joan Didion |
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9a5cb88
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I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. "I 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 ..
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Joan Didion |
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283d85a
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I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
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Joan Didion |
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c68efbd
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In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless. In
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Joan Didion |
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6b74027
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Someday it all comes.
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Joan Didion |
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5afa914
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In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.
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Joan Didion |
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a235faa
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To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.
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Joan Didion |
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3d557bf
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Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.
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Joan Didion |
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e89a21e
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A certe latitudini c'e un arco di tempo che precede e segue il solstizio d'estate, poche settimane appena, in cui il crepuscolo diventa lungo e azzurro. [...] Passi davanti a una vetrina, t'incammini verso Central Park e ti trovi a nuotare nell'azzurro: la luce e azzurra, e nel giro di un'ora questo azzurro s'infittisce, diventa piu intenso proprio mentre si oscura e sbiadisce, infine si avvicina all'azzurro delle vetrate in una giornata li..
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Joan Didion |
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00dd201
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it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself."
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wealth
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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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In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.
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Joan Didion |
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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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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 |
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f151599
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one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen.
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Joan Didion |
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0ca9532
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Because 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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Joan Didion |