American - Author | December 5, 1934 -
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
Joan Didion
GriefMeInterestingNothingSanity
I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.
CloudsAmazingBookFlyingWednesday
I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.
ShoesPeopleMeHusbandThinkKnow
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.
YouPersonGeneralImpulseDistract
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.
HomeChildrenResponsibilityChild
I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.
WritingDownUnderstandWayMean
I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.
MeRoadEveryoneBecauseMiddle
I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul.
FaithSoulManProblemsThought
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
ChildrenConnectedCaliforniaSee
The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.
ChildMeRoseStrongBlackClothes
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.
GoodOpportunityTruthPowerTime
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.
SpringColdFriendsLateFindKnow
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