Quotes from Joan Didion

I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.' And even a third way: It doesn't present as pain, I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.

Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon.

Information was control.

It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano's situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.

We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées. We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.

No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.

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.

You're a professional. Finish the piece. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

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.

Time is the school in which we learn.

We tell each other stories in order to live.

The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

It was the kind of Sunday to make one ache for Monday morning.

Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us.

Did mothers always try to press unto their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed. Did I?

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself.

One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.

some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.