Quotes from Joan Didion

Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as "wrinkly," or asked how old they are.

Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.

I know what 'nothing' means, and I keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.

I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire. - Donald Rumsfeld in Year of Magical Thinking

In fact I did not need to look, nor could I avoid them by not looking: I knew them by heart.

the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, sleepless. Persons they normally like, they often turn from.

It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

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.

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

Maria would say that they were not her friends, but Maria has never understood friendship, conversation, the normal amenities of social exchange. Maria has difficulty talking to people with whom she is not sleeping. I go to the Wilshire or the Beverly Hills, I say. I read the trades, I like to be alone at breakfast. In fact he doesn't always get breakfast out, Maria says, very low, to no one in particular. In fact the last time he got breakfast out was on April 17.

There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.

Above all, she is the girl who feels things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.

a vida muda rapidamente. a vida muda em um instante. você se senta para jantar, e a vida que você conhecia termina. a questão da autopiedade.

In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. 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.

I can now afford to think about her. I no longer cry when I hear her name. I no longer imagine the transporter being called to take her to the morgue after we left the ICU. Yet I still need her with me.

Out under the pepper trees the boys from the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of tequila for one dollar American, but it was inside the cavernous empty commissary where the talent sat around, the reasons for the exercise, all sitting around the big table picking at huevos con queso and Carta Blanca beer.

or amended and saved at 1:08 p.m. that afternoon

There he was, he had kept saying later. He was alive and then he was dead and we were watching. We saw him at the instant it happened we knew he was dead before his family did. Just an ordinary day. 'And then—gone.

In retrospect this had been my omen, my message, the early snowfall, the birthday present no one else could give me.

Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?