Quote

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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Expect
Apprehension
Sorrow
Waves
Eyes
Sudden
Suffering
Knees
Eye
Wave
Comes
Grief
Apprehensions
Nothing
Distance
Obliterate
Life
Blind
Weaken

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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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