Joan Didion Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

  Joan Didion

  Grieving, Missing, World

  Joan Didion (2007). “The Year of Magical Thinking”, p.192, Vintage

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• 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

  Choices, Able, Facts

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• 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

  Husband, Self, Psychosis

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• When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.

  Joan Didion

  Moving

  Joan Didion (2013). “After Henry”, p.84, Zola Books

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• I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.

  Joan Didion

  Typewriters, World, Tiny

  "Didion: 'A Book of Common Prayer'". "NBC Today Show" with Tom Brokaw, archives.nbclearn.com. February 4, 1977.

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• Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

  Joan Didion

  Blessed, Writing, Mind

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Oct 17, 2012

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• Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

  Joan Didion

  Book, Sleep, Rooms

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Oct 15, 2011

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• Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

  Joan Didion

  Thinking, Working Very Hard, Hard

  Joan Didion (1970). “Play it as it Lays”

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• 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

  Life, Believe, Progress

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• California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.

  Joan Didion

  Running, Loss, Sky

  Joan Didion (1968). “Slouching towards Bethlehem”

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• Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

  Joan Didion

  Grief, Turns, Magical Thinking

  Joan Didion (2009). “The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play”, p.58, Vintage

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• we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

  Joan Didion

  Inspirational, Loss, Bereavement

  "The Year of Magical Thinking". Book by Joan Didion, www.theguardian.com. 2005.

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• You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

  Joan Didion

  Decision, Right Decision, Ifs

  "Joan Didion’s Life: An Insider’s View". www.huffingtonpost.com. October 28, 2011.

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• 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.

  Joan Didion

  Wall, Night, Blue

  Joan Didion (2012). “Blue Nights (Enhanced Edition)”, p.134, Knopf

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• To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Cameras, Structure

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 27, 2011

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• My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.

  Joan Didion

  Running, People, Forget

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Aug 04, 2011

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Want

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• Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.

  Joan Didion

  Beautiful, Vegas, Devotion

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.64, Zola Books

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• 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

  Interview with Sheila Heti, www.believermag.com. December 2011.

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• The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

  Joan Didion

  America, Secret, Mobility

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.57, Zola Books

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• People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.

  Joan Didion

  Running, People, Doe

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.8, Zola Books

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• Mourning has its place but also its limits.

  Joan Didion

  Mourning, Limits

  Joan Didion (2007). “The Year of Magical Thinking”, p.54, Vintage

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• My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Filling In, Process

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• A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

  Joan Didion

  Love, Forever, Shapes

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 19, 2011

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• Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.

  Joan Didion

  Sky, West Coast, Afternoon

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