Joan Didion
Joan Didion
Joan Didionis an American author best known for her novels and her literary journalism. Her novels and essays explore the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos, where the overriding theme is individual and social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work...
bad deceiving heard hysteria imperative join moral morality necessity ourselves pragmatic start thinking whine
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
except hardly thank
There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you,
locked-doors lost stills
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
typewriters tiny world
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
vacuums reader ifs
If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
underwater way wanted
I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
tuesday september-11 united-states
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
adults ethics
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
narrative lines thin-air
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
landscape nostalgia homesick
There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
understanding tea firsts
prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... 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.
rats turns packs
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
witness wanted
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.