I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic. Joan Didion More Quotes by Joan Didion More Quotes From Joan Didion Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. Joan Didion dinner ends life The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language. Joan Didion mastery self thinking Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Joan Didion distance grief eye We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know. Joan Didion fractions want facts Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes. Joan Didion working-very-hard hard thinking We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence." Joan Didion psychosis husband self I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it. Joan Didion ownership land thinking When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them. Joan Didion wish writing children When the ground starts moving, all bets are off. Joan Didion moving Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back. Joan Didion shoulders salute hands I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it. Joan Didion shapes sitting want I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. Joan Didion breathing Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley. Joan Didion pain girl age Throw yourself into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it, to look at it, to witness it. Try and get it. Seize the moment. Joan Didion progress life believe Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left. Joan Didion left dying men I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it! Joan Didion mother writing ideas I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer. Joan Didion typewriters use writing When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing. Joan Didion writing may looks Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. Joan Didion water world thinking If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that admiration, if they're not used to being written about, if they're civilians, [...] they're not used to seeing themselves through other people's eyes. So you will always see them from a slightly different angle than they see themselves, and they feel a little betrayed by that. Joan Didion different eye people
