Quotes from Joan Didion

I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car. I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA 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.

I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself, D.H Lawrence wrote ... This may be what Lawrence (or we) would prefer to believe about wild things, but consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate. Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

This "I" was the voice of no author in my house. This "I" was someone who not only knew why Charlotte went to the airport but also knew someone called "Victor." Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? 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 I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only

All I know about grammar is its infinite power.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.

About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.

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

What would I give to be able to discuss anything at all with John? What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy? What would that small thing be? If I had said it in time would it have worked?

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.

I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening.

One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of 'privilege'? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity?

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty," Philippe Ariès wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. "But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

Il dolore non tiene le distanze. Il dolore arriva a ondate, parossismi, ansie improvvise che ti tagliano le gambe e ti accecano e cancellano la quotidianità della vita.

Nei momenti difficili, mi era stato insegnato fin dall'infanzia, leggi, impara, datti da fare, rivolgiti alla letteratura. Essere informati significava non perdere il controllo.

The bereaved must be urged to "sit in a sunny room," preferably one with an open fire.

I superstiti si voltano indietro e scorgono presagi, messaggi di cui non si sono accorti.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.