Joan Didion Quotes

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

No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION: It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.

Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes.

"Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." 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, but I do not mention this to Barbara."

You’re a professional. Finish the piece. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

if someone “chose” you, what does that tell you? Doesn’t it tell you that you were available to be “chosen”? Doesn’t it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world? The one who “chose” you? And the other who didn’t?

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.

"(About Georgia O'Keeffe:) 'The city men.' 'The men.' 'They.' The words crop up again and again as this astonishingly aggressive woman tells us what was on her mind when she was making her astonishingly aggressive paintings. It was those city men who stood accused of sentimentalizing her flowers: "I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see - and I don't.

It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano's situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.

We tell each other stories in order to live.

"NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune."

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself.