Quotes from Joan Didion

The Arquitectonica office, which produced the celebrated glass condominium on Brickell Avenue with the fifty-foot cube cut from its center, the frequently photographed "sky patio" in which there floated a palm tree, a Jacuzzi, and a lipstick-red spiral staircase, accompanied its elevations with crayon sketches, all moons and starry skies and airborne maidens, as in a Chagall.

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

Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

They come from all over, and they are on the average very young, very earnest, and not very much in touch with the larger scene, less refugees from it than children who do not quite apprehend it.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

Los recuerdos se borran, la memoria se adapta, la memoria se ajusta a lo que creemos recordar.

We love New York, the narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.

for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time preset or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew

In a time of disaster you could baste newspapers to both sides of a cotton blanket and end up with a warm quilt. She knew a lot of things about disaster. She could manage.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

She did not want to court further appraisal by asking anyone for anything.

The newspapers, censored, managed to report these rumors by carrying stories in which they deplored the spreading of rumors, or, as the newspapers put it, the propagation of falsehoods detrimental to public security. In order to deplore the falsehoods it was of course necessary to detail them, which was the trick.

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

We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes," Lionel Trilling once wrote. "Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.")

Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout.

people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Gandhi on Nonviolence, Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Jerome Frank's Breaking the Thought Barrier, Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom and Think on These Things, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite, Huxley's Ends and Means, and Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media.

But it should be Soon. Already I defend hotly Certain of our indefensible faults, Resent being reminded; already in my mind Our language becomes freighted with a richness No common tongue could offer, while the mountains Are like nowhere on earth, and the wide rivers.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to diner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.

one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity.

The bride wore a long white peau de soie dress and carried a shower bouquet of sweetheart roses with stephanotis streamers. A coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil.

Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?

Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.