Joan Didion Quotes

"Were we unusually dependent on one another the summer we swam and watched "Tenko" and went to dinner at Morton's?
Or were we unusually lucky?"

Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. “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.

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

"I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing."

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.

...nor can we know ahead of the fact 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 meaningless itself.

People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

As it happened, I didn't 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 the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.

I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point.

I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.