It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. Joan Didion More Quotes by Joan Didion More Quotes From Joan Didion We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. Joan Didion multiple-choicechoicessuicide Information is control. Joan Didion information There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go. Joan Didion Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever. Joan Didion talkingcharacterbook I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it's not the ideal, it's not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybeif I go ahead and finish it anywayI can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance. Joan Didion colorhatebook In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. Joan Didion absencenaturalloss I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed. Joan Didion linessightdeath I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right. Joan Didion grammar Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is. Joan Didion sanitygriefinteresting The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured. Joan Didion practicemeanthinking 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. Joan Didion springamericapeople Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be. Joan Didion grief Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. Joan Didion anxietypainyoga Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect. Joan Didion notebookselfshould-have New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion. Joan Didion notioncitiesnew-york I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood. Joan Didion coffeemotherwar It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. Joan Didion weatherwindpeople And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I. Joan Didion painunderstandingdoe For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I. Joan Didion common-denominatorrecordscommon The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past ... Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Joan Didion landsomewhere-elsepast
