Quotes by Joan Didion

The death of a parent, he wrote, despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago...

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies.

I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.

Was there ever in anyones life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?

I put the word diagnosis in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a diagnosis led to a cure, or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.

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.

It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

their suburbia house in Brentwood was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

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 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. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. 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.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

Aging and its evidence remain lifes most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

I write entirely to find out what Im thinking, what Im looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear>

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.