Quotes from Joan Didion

I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.

It had seemed this past month as if they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the blessing aspect. We omit the instant of sudden chill, the what-if, the free fall into certain failure. What if I fail to take care of this baby? What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me? And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby?

so hot that August comes on not like a month but like an affliction;

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.

sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain." Tightness in the throat.

Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.

Philippe Ariès, 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.

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.

Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs.

Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.

They who came to California were not the self-satisfied, happy and content people, but the adventurous, the restless, and the daring. They were different even from those who settled in other western states. They didn't come west for homes and security, but for adventure and money. They pushed in over the mountains and founded the biggest cities in the west.

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them

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.

Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

Were we unusually dependent on one another the summer we swam and watched Tenko and went to dinner at Morton's? Or were we unusually lucky?

When my mother was near death at age ninety she told me that she was ready to die but could not. "You and Jim need me," she said. My brother and I were by then in our sixties.

January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past.

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

After a while there were no more tule fogs at dawn and all Charlotte wanted was one night that did not end badly.