Quotes from Joan Didion

It occurs to me as I write that this white light, usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. Everything went white, those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint.

That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.

Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

sometimes I get lonesome for a storm, a full blown storm where everything changes. the sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animal scatter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. but it's really God- playing music in his favourite cathedral in heaven- shattering stained glass- playing a gigantic organ- thundering on the keys- perfect harmony- perfect joy .

Everybody says I'm politically naive, and I am," she says after a while. It is something she says frequently to people she does not know. "So are the people running politics, or we wouldn't be in wars, would we.

They are very gracious and very enthusiastic, and give such an appearance of health and happiness and hope that I sometimes find it difficult to talk to them.

What's the matter, Maria said, standing in the doorway in the dark. It isn't any better. How do you know. He said nothing, I mean we didn't even try. You don't want it. I do too. No, he said. You don't.

The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.

Mr. Schorer, a man of infinite kindness to and acuity about his students divined intuitively that my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that I would never be.

I love you, she whispered, but it was more a plea than a declaration and in any case he made no response.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we've learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

On a psychiatric test administered while she was in custody she completed the sentence "Most men ..." with the words "... are assholes".

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

No one who has ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of a the provincial adolescent.

By 'the long view' I believe she meant history. Or more exactly, the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it, that Inez's experience had tended to deny.

It's all gone with you, he said. It used to be there but it's gone. Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

No one could have missed the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as if in wildlife documentary, when things did not go his [Clinton] way. That famous tendency of the candidate to take a less than forthcoming approach to embarrassing questions that had already been well documented.

He had shrugged and said that the course of true love never was a straight flush.

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

Life with these people had the distorted logic of dreams, and Patricia Hearst seems to have accepted it with the wary acquiescence of the dreamer. Any face could turn against her. Any move could prove lethal.