American - Author | December 5, 1934 -
We all survive more than we think we can.
Joan Didion
SurviveThinkMoreThan
When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.
MotherChildYellowSomeoneYearGo
My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.
MotherFriendsCookiesWaySeeOwn
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
LiveTellOrderStoriesOurselves
You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.
FocusYouLineThrowNovel
I never think people are too careful with me.
PeopleMeThinkNeverCarefulToo
It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
ProcessPoliticalBecomeClearMeant
The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
WordsMindPictureShortLongYou
To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.
WomanBrokenSomeoneYouUnderstand
To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.
ExplorationMoralAnalysisMayUs
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Joan Didion quotes