Quotes from Joan Didion

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

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.

Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.

This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of "real life".

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.

So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette.

Maria, for Christ's fucking sake, they've been screening it every night for a month, you know that—oh shit." "I didn't mean to be that way," she said after a while. "You never mean to be any way.

I am what I am. To look for «reasons» is beside the point.

The images would flash at Maria like slides in a dark room. On film they might have seemed a family.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Lesbians discussed the dehumanizing aspect of American technology, in French.

In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.

I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.

I thought about the way we danced, close.

what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention.

one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen.

What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace.

Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. ...... Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

A young woman with long hair and a short white halter walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely at this moment that made play it as it lays begin to tell itself to me.

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz

That we had been drawn, both by a misapprehension of the local rhetoric and by the manipulation of our own rhetorical weaknesses, into a game we did not understand, a play of power in a political tropic alien to us, seemed apparent, and yet there we remained.

In that instant I thought I grieved for James Jones, a man I never met, but I think I grieved for all of us: for Jones, for myself, for the sufferers of mean guilts and for their exorcists, for Robert E. Lee Prewitt, for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and for this golden nitwit who believed eternity to be a psychic science.

I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.