“When someone dies, don’t dwell on it.'Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point.”Ģ0. “Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”ġ9. “We all remember what we need to remember.”ġ7. “I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself.”ġ6.
If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.”ġ4. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion.
“The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”ġ3. “We tell each other stories in order to live.”ġ2. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. “Time is the school in which we learn.”ġ0. “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”ĩ. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.”ħ. “Quite simply, I was in love with New York. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”Ħ. “All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”Ĥ. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”ģ. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”Ģ. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. To make your own work and take pride in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I would say more but I am too busy weeping like the sensitive literary nerd I am so let’s get to what you came here for: 20 absolutely gorgeous Joan Didion quotes. That was the first book of essays I had ever read. Then our professor passed out a fully photocopied version of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and my world shattered into stars. Older boys who played Rise Against! songs on their guitars at frat parties they were too old to go to and took ten pages to describe a woman’s tits called me a navel gazer and I felt completely out of my depth. Joan Didion was my only friend in the nonfiction graduate class I took as an undergrad. She died Thursday from complications of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 87. Among her work: the 1976 adaptation of “A Star is Born,” starring Barbara Streisand the 2005 National Book Award winning memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking ” and “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” a collection of essays written between the late 1960s and early 2000s which was released in 2021. She moved between genres as easily as between subjects, working as a novelist, screenwriter, political reporter, and essayist. For decades, Didion captured the changing political, social, and cultural landscapes of the country, in a voice both observant and personal. America lost a literary icon today with the passing of acclaimed writer Joan Didion.
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