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...
dream
We all have the same dreams.
dream writing
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
dream listening want
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.
dream new-york thinking
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
love dream men
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.
dream listening reader
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
assumed husband overcome shock
The shock of it was that this time, she had a lot of strength, ... Her husband and I assumed she'd overcome it.
happens people
This one is really fantastic, ... It's not about grieving. It's about what happens when people die.
except hardly thank
There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you,
free lies power singular
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
bad deceiving heard hysteria imperative join moral morality necessity ourselves pragmatic start thinking whine
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.
changes dinner life sit
Life changes fast, ... Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
action dread escaping feared generation official optimism others seemed shared silent social
We were that generation called ''silent,'' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.
argument begin bridge further occurred step taking
That's something we have to feel out. It occurred to me to begin with, as a way of taking it a step further, but there's another argument that the step further may be a bridge too far.