Joan Didion quotes - page 2

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. (Joan Didion)
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game? View quote
Joan Didion
I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. View quote
Joan Didion
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
The past could be jettisoned... but seeds got carried. View quote
Joan Didion
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. (Joan Didion)
When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. View quote
Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. View quote
Joan Didion
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. View quote
Joan Didion
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. View quote
Joan Didion
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young. View quote
Joan Didion
I don't know what I think until I write it down. View quote
Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. View quote
Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. View quote
Joan Didion
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. View quote
Joan Didion
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. (Joan Didion)
[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before. View quote
Joan Didion
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. View quote
Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. View quote
Joan Didion
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self. View quote
Joan Didion