Joan Didion Quotes - Page 2

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.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.

Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

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

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.

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

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.

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. 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.

When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

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 dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

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?

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