Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didionis an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work...
voice nonfiction fiction
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
memories denial only-time
Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.
angel mind return
Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.
feels
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
would-be fantasy spectacular
My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
paper bags cry
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Writers are only rarely likable.
iowa california west
California: The west coast of Iowa.
self hands play
If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us… We play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
children order definitions
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
rain dark clouds
Outside, a ceiling of pearly gray clouds coalesced over Manhattan, and the apartment had grown dark. It just keeps dripping. It's been like this all week, .. Rain would be a relief.
thinking land ownership
I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.
mean games aces
I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?
kindness real winning
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.