Joan Didion Quotes

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking what I'm looking at what I see and what it means what I want and what I fear.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it but that it is a moral imperative that we have it. Then is when we join the fashionable madmen and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land and then is when we are in bad trouble.

More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child’s primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.

Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.