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...
life respect spring
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
spring character responsibility
People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.
new-york spring twilight
...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.
spring america people
It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.
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.
last selling somebody writers
That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out
bit hits people
It's always something minor. Some bit of information. Some interesting development. I think it hits people forever.