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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

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Imagine
Choices
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Facts
Able
Things
Survive
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Wouldn

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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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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.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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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.
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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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.
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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.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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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.
Joan Didion