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Joan Didion

Joan Didion Quotes

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Famous Joan Didion Quotes

“I think about swimming with him into that cave, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. He never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.”

GriefMourningGrief And Loss
Book:The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play
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“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing.' A Certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to 'get through it,' rise to the occasion, exhibit the 'strength' that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

DeathLossGriefMourningFuneralMeaninglessness
Author:Joan Didion
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“Despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, [the death of a parent] dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and may cut free memories and feelings that we thought had gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”

MayLongFeelingsMightAgeParentMemoriesGoneCuttingPeriodsBedOceanSilentSurpriseDepthReactionsDespitePreparationGrievingMourningLong AgoRecollectionSubmarines
Author:Joan Didion
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“We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."”

PeoplePersonsSelfFeelingsHappensLostLeftFeltFocusWifeAdviceObjectsSourceHusbandFlowPityMediumsPermanentMourningVisibleReportsDividesVery StrongReceivingSelf PityClingingPsychosisApparitions
Author:Joan Didion
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