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...
time memories night
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
night thinking doors
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
book night blue
This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.
wall night blue
Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.
night light blue
What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
night august president
On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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.