“ People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The… Joan Didion
“ We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. Joan Didion
“ This book is called Blue Nights because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dy… Joan Didion
“ Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is nothing. Joan Didion
“ I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos. Joan Didion
“ We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. Joan Didion
“ It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive. Joan Didion
“ I put the word diagnosis in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a diagnosis led to a cure, or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility. Joan Didion
“ Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us. Joan Didion
“ It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up cau… Joan Didion
“ I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. Joan Didion
“ In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it. Joan Didion
