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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6e7ad94 | They caught him again, at the foot of the woods, and he fought them with his teeth and his claws but they were bigger, stronger, and they carried him back as they always had and always would because there was no freedom, not anymore. Now he was a creature of the walls and the rooms and a slave to the food they gave him. | T. Coraghessan Boyle | ||
| 92a7939 | crossed the room and lit a cigarette, though smoking was discouraged on campus and about as stupid and self-destructive an activity as anything our species has devised. | T. Coraghessan Boyle | ||
| d00d96c | In de Pekel Zitten | T. Coraghessan Boyle | ||
| 879aa35 | For weeks in advance of the date he would storm and rage and fulminate about the inequity of it all, and the old contumacious fire-breathing spirit arose like a phoenix from the ashes of his contentment. | T. Coraghessan Boyle | ||
| bbe6c74 | but outside, in the desert, where the air was thin and light pollution unheard of, you could see right up into the back molars of the universe. | T. Coraghessan Boyle | ||
| e5eed19 | 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 | Joan Didion | ||
| 02761cf | I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world. | Joan Didion | ||
| 1eb7e6e | 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.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 55cd510 | pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again. | Joan Didion | ||
| d03b636 | 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" | Joan Didion | ||
| 4723717 | 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" -- | Joan Didion | ||
| 540e2f9 | 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 .. | Joan Didion | ||
| b6cb26c | In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. | Joan Didion | ||
| d1d6ecf | 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. | Joan Didion | ||
| edd6c94 | Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. | living | Joan Didion | |
| 9f2d5d4 | After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire. - Donald Rumsfeld in Year of Magical Thinking | Joan Didion | ||
| f8cc1b4 | 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.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 2307eeb | 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 | Joan Didion | ||
| ca78c42 | 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. | morality | Joan Didion | |
| ecc1b5b | Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: | Joan Didion | ||
| e8a350f | confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, | Joan Didion | ||
| 1c43b22 | 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. | Joan Didion | ||
| 8605cb1 | In the midst of life we are in death, | Joan Didion | ||
| 28861c5 | 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." | Joan Didion | ||
| eb115d6 | 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> | Joan Didion | ||
| 3a25522 | Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. | Joan Didion | ||
| 6bf7497 | Sonora | Joan Didion | ||
| a15916d | 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. | Joan Didion | ||
| 87bc451 | 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.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0e9a43a | If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? | Joan Didion | ||
| 08120c9 | We tell ourselves stories in order to live, | Tracy Daugherty | ||
| 66e839e | Just an ordinary day. "And then--gone." | Joan Didion | ||
| 201e49d | The bereaved must be urged to "sit in a sunny room," preferably one with an open fire." | Joan Didion | ||
| 7bdc345 | 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. | Joan Didion | ||
| 59759a2 | 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. | Joan Didion | ||
| f151599 | one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0ca9532 | 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. | Joan Didion | ||
| 08cf33b | Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he? | second-chanc impermanence regret | Joan Didion | |
| 8e755a6 | Cos'e che rende malvagio Jago? Si chiede certa gente. Io non me lo chiedo mai. Altro esempio, un esempio che viene in mente perche la signora Burstein stamattina ha visto un serpentello a sonagli tra i carciofi dell'orto e d'allora in poi e stata intrattabile: io non faccio mai domande sui serpenti. Perche il profumo Shalimar dovrebbe attrarre i crotali. Perche una serpe corallo dovrebbe aver bisogno di due ghiandole di veleno neurotossico.. | joan-didion | Joan Didion | |
| 2373101 | When I ask my students to journal daily, I ask them not to judge and not to filter. Just put it down, I say--whatever you think of, however you want. A week goes by, and I send along a copy of Joan Didion's short, classic essay "On Keeping a Notebook." Write three paragraphs about the notebook pages that you have been keeping, I say. What is the value of the notes you have kept? What did they teach you about yourself? How honest are the pag.. | Beth Kephart | ||
| e179519 | 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. Persons they normally like, they often turn from. | Joan Didion | ||
| 393fdc3 | In retrospect this had been my omen, my message, the early snowfall, the birthday present no one else could give me. | Joan Didion | ||
| 0eaca9f | Philippe Aries, in The Hour of Our Death, points out that the essential characteristic of death as it appears in the Chanson de Roland is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, "gives advance warning of its arrival." | Joan Didion | ||
| b1da0f2 | lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. 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. | Joan Didion |