Quotes from Joan Didion

This sense that the world can be reinvented [evokes] the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring...

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.

The 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.

I don't know what I think until I write about it.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again.

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

Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After

They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.

I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother's teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that.

The second kind of grief was "complicated grief," which was also known in the literature as "pathological bereavement" and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another.

Les gens qui ont perdu quelqu'un ont un air particulier, que seuls peut-être ceux qui l'ont décelé sur leur propre visage peuvent reconnaître. Je l'ai remarqué sur mon visage et je le remarque à présent sur d'autres. C'est un air d'extrême vulnérabilité, une nudité, une béance.

Misinformation about rattlesnakes is a leitmotiv of the insomniac imagination in Los Angeles.

There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

Someday it all comes.

confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred

Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be Where no storms come.

Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.

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.

What seemed novel about the use of focus groups in the 1992 campaign was the increasingly narrow part of the population to which either party was interested in listening, and the extent to which this extreme selectivity had transformed the governing of the country, for most of its citizens, into a series of signals meant for someone else.

Had he not warned me when I forgot my own notebook that the ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able to write?