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Famous Joan Didion Quotes

“Quem sofre a perda de uma pessoa amada pensa muito a respeito da autopiedade. Nós nos preocupamos com ela, a tememos, vasculhamos nossos pensamentos em busca de sinais dela. Temos medo de que nossas reações denunciem a condição descrita, de forma reveladora, como “remoer o sofrimento”. Compreendemos a aversão que a maior parte de nós tem a “remoer o sofrimento”. O luto visível nos lembra a morte, o que é considerado antinatural, uma incapacidade de lidar com a situação. “Uma única pessoa está ausente, mas o mundo inteiro parece vazio”, escreveu Phillipe Ariès a respeito dessa aversão em História da morte no Ocidente. “Mas uma pessoa não tem mais o direito de dizê-lo em voz alta.” Lembramos a nós mesmos, repetidas vezes, que nossa própria perda não é nada se comparada à perda vivenciada (ou, ainda pior, não vivenciada) por aquele que morreu; essa tentativa de corrigir o pensamento serve apenas para nos fazer mergulhar ainda mais nas profundezas da autopiedade. (Por que não enxerguei isso, por que sou tão egoísta?) A própria linguagem que usamos, quando pensamos na autopiedade, revela a profunda repulsa que sentimos por ela: autopiedade é sentir pena de si mesmo, autopiedade é chupar dedo, autopiedade é ah,coitadinho de mim, autopiedade é o estado que se permitem, ou do qual até mesmo se comprazem, aqueles que sentem pena de si mesmos. A autopiedade permanece ao mesmo tempo o mais comum e o mais universalmente abominado de nossos defeitos, sua destrutividade pestilenta aceita como algo inevitável. “Nosso pior inimigo”, dizia Hellen Keller. Nunca vi um animal selvagem/ sentir pena de si mesmo, escreveu D.H. Lawrence em uma homilia de quatro versos muito citada que, quando analisada, se revela cheia de significados tendenciosos. Um pequeno pássaro cairá morto de um galho, congelado,/ sem nunca ter sentido pena de si mesmo.Isso pode ser o que Lawrence (ou nós) preferia acreditar em relação aos animais selvagens, mas consideremos os golfinhos, que se recusam a comer depois da morte do parceiro. Consideremos os gansos, que procuram pelo parceiro perdido até ficarem desorientados e morrerem. Na verdade, quem sofre essa perda tem razões urgentes, até mesmo uma necessidade urgente, para sentir pena de si mesmo. Maridos saem de casa, esposas saem de casa, divórcios acontecem, mas esses maridos e essas esposas deixam para trás teias de associações intactas, por mais amargas que sejam. Apenas aqueles que sobrevivem a uma morte ficam de fato sozinhos. As conexões que constituíam sua vida — tanto as profundas quanto as aparentemente insignificantes (até serem rompidas) — desaparecem por inteiro.”

Luto
Book:The Year of Magical Thinking
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“O poder que a dor de perder uma pessoa querida tem de perturbar a mente já foi exaustivamente investigado. O ato de sofrer por essa perda, nos disse Freud em Luto e melancolia, de 1917, “envolve um grande desvio da atitude normal em relação à vida”. No entanto, observou ele, essa dor permanece peculiar entre os transtornos: “Nunca nos ocorre encará-la como uma condição patológica e submetê-la a tratamento médico.” Em vez disso, nos apegamos ao fato de que “ela será superada depois de um lapso de tempo”. Encaramos “qualquer interferência em relação a ela como inútil e até mesmo prejudicial”. Melanie Klein, em seu texto de 1940, “O luto e sua relação com os estados maníaco-depressivos”, fez uma avaliação semelhante: “A pessoa que experimenta o luto está, na verdade, doente, mas como esse estado mental é tão comum e nos parece tão natural, não chamamos o luto de doença [...] Para expressar minha conclusão de maneira mais precisa: devo dizer que, durante o luto, o sujeito passa por um estado maníaco-depressivo modificado e transitório, que vai superar.” Note a ênfase em “superar”.”

FreudLutoMelanie Klein
Book:The Year of Magical Thinking
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“I continue opening boxes. I find more faded and cracked photographs than I ever want to see. I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married. I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos 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.”

GriefMementos
Book:Blue Nights
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“De nabestaande moet worden aangemoedigd 'te gaan zitten in een zonnig vertrek', bij voorkeur met een open haard. Er mag eten, maar 'in zeer kleine hoeveelheden', worden aangeboden op een dienblad: thee, koffie, bouillon, wat toast, een gepocheerd ei. Melk mag ook, maar alleen warme: 'Koude melk is slecht voor iemand die toch al onderkoeld is.' Wat de overige voeding betreft: 'De kok kan iets voorstellen wat doorgaans heel lekker wordt gevonden - maar er dient heel weinig tegelijk te worden geserveerd, want de maag mag wel leeg zijn, de tong verwerpt de gedachte aan eten, en de spijsvertering laat zeker te wensen over.' De rouwende wordt aangeraden zuinig aan te doen bij de aanschaf van rouwkleding: de meeste reeds bestaande kledingstukken, en ook leren schoeisel en strohoeden, 'laten zich volmaakt zwart verven'. De te maken kosten moeten vooraf worden berekend. Tijdens de begrafenis dient er een vriend achter te blijven in het huis. Deze moet ervoor zorg dragen dat het gelucht wordt, dat verplaatst meubilair weer wordt teruggezet en de haard wordt aangestoken om de familie te verwelkomen. 'Het verdient ook aanbeveling wat thee of een soepje klaar te maken,' laat mevrouw Post ons weten, 'en dat dient hun bij thuiskomst te worden gebracht zonder eerst te vragen of ze het believen. Mensen die veel verdriet hebben willen niet eten, maar als ze het krijgen voorgeschoteld zullen ze het automatisch aannemen, en iets warms om de spijsvertering op gang te brengen en de gebrekkige bloedsomloop te stimuleren is wat ze bovenal behoeven.”

VerdrietRouwBegrafenisTroost
Book:The Year of Magical Thinking
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“You will notice that participants in disasters typically locate the "beginning" of the disaster at a point suggesting their own control over events. A plane crash retold will not begin with the pressure system over the Central Pacific that caused the instability over the Gulf that caused the wind shear at DFW but at some manageable human intersect, with for example the "funny feeling" ignored at breakfast. An account of a 6.8 earthquake will begin not at the overlap of the tectonic plates but more comfortably, at the place in London where we ordered the Spode that shattered the morning the tectonic plates shifted. Had we just gone with the funny feeling. Had we just never ordered the Spode. We all prefer the magical explanation. (page 15)”

Observations On Humanity
Book:The Last Thing He Wanted
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“He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. Jesus Christ. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child’s whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priest came to tear up his mother’s grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily’s was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing.”

RelationshipsDepressing
Book:Run River
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“Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, The Titanic: how the might are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in AMerica is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. Is is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.”

Howard HughesJoan Didion7000 Romaine Los Angeles 38
Book:Slouching towards Bethlehem
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“We closed the deal and moved to New York. Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Condé Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married.”

TangentsFunny Aside
Book:Blue Nights
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“What happened in New York and Washington and abroad seemed to impinge not at all upon the Sacramento min. I remember being taken to call upon a very old woman, a rancher's widow, who was reminiscing (the favored conversational mode in Sacramento) about the son of some contemporaries of hers. 'That Johnston boy never did amount to much,' she said. Desultorily, my mother protested: Alva Johnston, she said, had won the Pulitzer Prize, when he was working for The New York Times. Our hostess looked at us impassively. 'He never amounted to anything in Sacramento,' she said.”

New York TimesSacramento
Book:Slouching towards Bethlehem
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“I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might not appear, might or might not involve my eyes. They might or might not involve my arms or legs, they might or might not be disabling. Their effects might be lessened by cortisone injections, or they might not. It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant nothing and the neurologist did not like to use it. The name was multiple sclerosis, but the name had no meaning. This was, the neurologist said, an exclusionary diagnosis, and meant nothing. I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.”

FearDiseaseUncertaintyMultiple Sclerosis
Book:The White Album
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“There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”

PeaceSelf RespectPrivacyReconciliationEden
Book:Slouching towards Bethlehem
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“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can "drive" on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”

PeopleThinkingWayMindKindSeemsLosingCleanMereDrivingSurrenderIntenseRhythmConcentrationLos AngelesSecularCommunionParticipationVocationLanesRaptureResistingParticipatingFreewaysDriving On
Author:Joan Didion
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“I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it's not the ideal, it's not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.”

IfsWorldWantWellsMadeI CanBookWantedHateTurnsNextChancePerfectObjectsColorTenPagesIdealsI HateMade ItNext TimeDiscouragingAnother ChanceAccommodations
Author:Joan Didion
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“Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.”

PainHoursTenAnxietyYogaIllnessVainPleasantConcentrationResentmentTwelveUsefulnessCircuitsEuphoriaFuseMigraine
Book:The White Album
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