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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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? | impermanence regret second-chanc | 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 | ||
| 1b499eb | About Georgia O'Keeffe:) 'The city men.' 'The men.' 'They.' The words crop up again and again as this astonishingly aggressive woman tells us what was on her mind when she was making her astonishingly aggressive paintings. It was those city men who stood accused of sentimentalizing her flowers: "I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flow.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 044e2cc | 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. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day's mail with real enthusiasm--maybe it is Vogue, maybe it is Foreign Affairs, whatever it is we are intensely interested, pleased to have this handbook to keeping up, this key to .. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4c1d8a6 | and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. | Joan Didion | ||
| 212d83f | both schoolteachers and both dedicated to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, whose members observe the Sabbath on Saturday, believe in an apocalyptic Second Coming, have a strong missionary tendency, and, if they are strict, do not smoke, drink, eat meat, use makeup, or wear jewelry, including wedding rings. | Joan Didion | ||
| 06b7371 | Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life--both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections--have all vanished. | death grief human-connection loneliness survivors | Joan Didion | |
| e92890e | If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent. | Joan Didion | ||
| b577f29 | They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of "brotherhood." | Joan Didion | ||
| 03bd5f6 | Havana vanities come to dust in Miami. | miami | Joan Didion | |
| db2db05 | We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see,we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4d8f511 | one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, | Joan Didion | ||
| efd15c0 | At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girls' school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care. At thenty-four she left all those opinions behi.. | Joan Didion |