599 Quotes by Joan Didion
- Author Joan Didion
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I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.
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- Author Joan Didion
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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.
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- Author Joan Didion
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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.
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- Author Joan Didion
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It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.
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- Author Joan Didion
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Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.
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- Author Joan Didion
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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in you eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
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- Author Joan Didion
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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...
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- Author Joan Didion
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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.
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- Author Joan Didion
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...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
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