We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it. Joan Didion More Quotes by Joan Didion More Quotes From Joan Didion any compulsion tries to justify itself. Joan Didion inexplicable compulsion trying Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa. Joan Didion iowa california land Mourning has its place but also its limits. Joan Didion mourning limits On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it. Joan Didion want writing thinking New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony. Joan Didion new-york adventure people There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could. Joan Didion impulse persons grieving I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I've done that day. I can't do it late in the afternoon because I'm too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. Joan Didion afternoon done needs There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic. Joan Didion pieces leaving writing Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears. Joan Didion childhood california chicago My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts. Joan Didion notebook mother writing I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Joan Didion talking character ideas Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service. Joan Didion flawless mirrors ideas But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay. Joan Didion vanity dog men Time is the school in which we learn. Joan Didion time-management new-year school prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat. Joan Didion understanding hot tea I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Joan Didion alive trying order I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. Joan Didion variables cutting rooms Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. Joan Didion criticism self opportunity I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally. Joan Didion daughter light art To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. Joan Didion respect self love
