Joan Didion citations

Page 2

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

“I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.”

“Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.”

“I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”

“I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs… The way I write is who I am, or have become…”

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

“What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.”

“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.”

“The past could be jettisoned… but seeds got carried.”

“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?”

“One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.”

“Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.”

“When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.”

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.”