Quotes from Joan Didion

Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present, or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.

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.

She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything 'sad'.

I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.

I put the word diagnosis in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a diagnosis led to a cure, or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.

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.

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.

The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print.

There were the youngest children, small girls with leis, barefoot. There were watercress sandwiches, champagne, lemonade, peach-colored napkins to match the sorbet that came with the cake, peacocks on the lawn. She kicked off the expensive shoes and unpinned the veil. 'Wasn't that just about perfect,' she said when she called that evening.

I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?

I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.

Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.

Just an ordinary day. "And then—gone.

recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred

My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.

I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that...

Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.

It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.

More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child's primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living.

We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.

Memory fades, memory adjusts , memory conforms to what we think we remember.