Quotes from Joan Didion

Uno no teme por lo que ha perdido. Lo que ha perdido ya está en el muro. Lo que ha perdido ya está al otro lado de las puertas cerradas. Uno teme por lo que todavía no ha perdido. Puede que ustedes todavía no vean nada por perder. Y, sin embargo, no hay día en su vida en que yo no la vea.

La vie change vite. La vie change dans l'instant. On s'apprête à dîner et la vie telle qu'on la connaît s'arrête.

you can love more than one person." Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

They lost concentration. After a year I could read headlines, I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

Seuls ceux qui survivent à une mort se retrouvent véritablement seuls. Les liens qui constituaient leur existence - les plus profonds comme les plus insignifiants en apparence - ont tous disparu.

Only the survivors of a death and truly left alone

I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying. It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight. He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.

Nous ne sommes pas des bêtes idéalisées. Nous sommes d'imparfaits mortels, conscients de cette mortalité alors même que nous la rejetons, trahis par notre propre complexité, ainsi faits que lorsque nous pleurons nos pertes, c'est aussi, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, nous-mêmes que nous pleurons. Tels que nous étions. Tels que nous ne sommes plus. Tels qu'un jour nous ne serons plus du tout.

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.

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

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.

O mal de origem com que o homem nasce. Nós não somos animais selvagens idealizados. Somos seres mortais imperfeitos, conscientes dessa mortalidade mesmo quando a negamos, traídos por nossa própria complexidade, tão incorporada que quando choramos a perda de seres amados também estamos chorando, para o bem ou para o mal, por nós mesmos. Pela perda daquilo que éramos. Do que não somos mais. Do que um dia não seremos de todo.

Why did I keep stressing what was and was not normal, when nothing about it was?

I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco's dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light.

De ce trebuie s? ai mereu dreptate, îmi spunea el. N-a înÈ›eles vreodat? c? în mintea mea n-aveam niciodat? dreptate.

Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had changed. Only recently have I come to see them as quite the opposite, evidence of how California had not changed, and to understand change itself as one of the culture's most enduring misunderstandings about itself.

the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.

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

De fiecare dat? aceste rug?minÈ›i pentru prezenÈ›a lui nu au f?cut decât s?-mi înt?reasc? conÈ™tiinÈ›a t?cerii definitive care ne-a desp?rÈ›it.