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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1a6b7a1 | The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.) | Joan Didion | ||
| 8a051e0 | There he was, he had kept saying later. He was alive and then he was dead and we were watching. We saw him at the instant it happened we knew he was dead before his family did. Just an ordinary day. 'And then--gone. | Joan Didion | ||
| 8781595 | In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. | Joan Didion | ||
| dcf058b | 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. | Joan Didion | ||
| e79b747 | NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune." | Joan Didion | ||
| 9e150d6 | Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss each other's points, have another drink and regard the fire. | Joan Didion | ||
| 27248f6 | At least some of the time, the world appears to me as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch; were I to follow my conscience then, it would lead me out onto the desert with Marion Faye, out to where he stood in The Deer Park looking east to Los Alamos and praying, as if for rain, that it would happen: '...let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in th.. | Joan Didion | ||
| f01ea44 | No one who has ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of a the provincial adolescent. | Joan Didion | ||
| 638725b | No one could have missed the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as if in wildlife documentary, when things did not go his [Clinton] way. That famous tendency of the candidate to take a less than forthcoming approach to embarrassing questions that had already been well documented. | Joan Didion | ||
| 5273d5c | Huey Newton laid down his life for us," Stokely Carmichael had said the same night. But of course Huey Newton had not yet laid down his life at all, was just here in the Alameda County Jail waiting to be tried," -- | Joan Didion | ||
| f47356b | All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it--that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death--could now be declared in valid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all. | Joan Didion | ||
| c488287 | It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes." "In some ways it was the conventional clandestine affair in a place like San Bernardino, a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed." "January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the ki.. | Joan Didion | ||
| cfe0f66 | Happiness is,' after all, a consumption ethic. | consumption happiness | Joan Didion | |
| aa34a78 | 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 | ||
| a58e1bb | I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, fo.. | Joan Didion | ||
| caa653c | occult enchantment, from that febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos which renders exile so potent an organizing principle. | Joan Didion | ||
| 6453fa9 | anise tea. "Meditation turns us on," Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers." | Joan Didion | ||
| f4b8311 | 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. . . . Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. --Joan Didion | Rachel Wilkerson Miller | ||
| 32f0d10 | I never learned the answer, nor did the answer matter, for one of the eerie and liberating aspects of broadcast discourse is that nothing one says will alter in the slightest either the form or the length of the conversation. | Joan Didion | ||
| 5364271 | I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure. | Joan Didion | ||
| 6a1247b | The bookshelves were lined with Joan Didion and Flannery O'Connor, a small, unexpected collection of musicalia, essay collections on Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. There was a framed poster of an exhibit of romantic landscape paintings in Dresden. Intellectuals had their own thing going, that was for sure. | books intellectuals music | Gary Shteyngart | |
| 44777b9 | You're safe, I remembered whispering to Quintana when I first saw her in the ICU at UCLA. I'm here. You're going to be all right. Half of her skull had been shaved for surgery. I could see the long cut and the metal staples that held it closed. She was again breathing only through an endotracheal tube. I'm here. Everything's fine . . . I would take care of her. It would be all right. It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could no.. | David Sheff | ||
| dc55e03 | It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. | Joan Didion | ||
| d50929f | To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent | Joan Didion | ||
| bf86b2f | Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. | Joan Didion | ||
| 8c84383 | Hawaii is our Gibraltar, and almost our Channel Coast. Planes, their eyes sharpened by the year-round clearness of blue Pacific days, can keep easy watch over an immense sea-circle, of which Hawaii is the centre. With Hawaii on guard, a surprise attack on us from Asia, the experts believe, would be quite impossible. So long as the great Pearl Harbor Naval Base, just down the road from Honolulu, is ours, American warships and submarines can .. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4ae35f1 | We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are be definition more interesting that ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing ... Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rain trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to aff.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 3690fb6 | Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be. | fame | Joan Didion | |
| 9a42c5c | the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes. | Joan Didion | ||
| d9aa109 | In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theor.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 9cfb3de | To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone "oppressed" to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make fifty-one per cent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. The creation of this revolutionary "class" was from the virtual beginning the "idea" of the women's movement, and the tendency for popular discussi.. | Joan Didion | ||
| 4dbaaab | 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? | Joan Didion | ||
| 923155e | 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. | Joan Didion | ||
| a637650 | What happened in New York and Washington and abroad seemed to impinge not at all upon the Sacramento min. I remember being taken to call upon a very old woman, a rancher's widow, who was reminiscing (the favored conversational mode in Sacramento) about the son of some contemporaries of hers. 'That Johnston boy never did amount to much,' she said. Desultorily, my mother protested: Alva Johnston, she said, had won the Pulitzer Prize, when he .. | sacramento | Joan Didion | |
| 175edb1 | Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions" and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means." | Joan Didion | ||
| 31507ba | Philosophic thoughts allow people to use human reason and imagination to consider eternal matters and explore the ramifications of their own transience. American author Joan Didion postulated that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Conceivably a personal crisis propels a person to delve into creating a guiding philosophy for living with reduced mental and emotional turmoil. Alternatively, perhaps we tell stories to examine, explain.. | memoir-writing story story-of-a-soul story-of-life story-of-my-life story-of-your-life storytelling telling-stories writing-memoir | Kilroy J. Oldster | |
| 685a984 | II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. | Adam Smith | ||
| ffb9ddc | My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out. | Joan Didion | ||
| 5bfffb6 | You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing -- beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code -- what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil." I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of "morality" seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightfo.. | Joan Didion | ||
| dfc5596 | Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter. | Joan Didion | ||
| 308fe01 | She never puts on any weight, you'll notice that's often true of selfish women. | Joan Didion | ||
| d59b7b1 | Fui escritora a vida inteira: enquanto escritora, ainda mesmo em crianca e muito antes de o que escrevia comecar a ser publicado, desenvolvi a percepcao de que os significados residem nos ritmos das palavras, das frases e dos paragrafos, tecnica de resguardar atras de um verniz cada vez mais impenetravel qualquer pensamento ou conviccao pessoais. O modo como escrevo e quem eu sou ou em quem me tornei; porem, neste caso, quisera ter, em vez .. | Joan Didion | ||
| 328c1a4 | 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 | ||
| b7af175 | We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die." -- | Edwidge Danticat |