Joan Didion Quote

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

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.

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About Joan Didion

Joan Didion (; December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Didion wrote essays for The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.