35 phrases by Joan Didion for those who are a fan of this amazing journalist

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the illusion that he likes himself.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Water is important for people who don’t have it, and so is control.

We are not able to contemplate the death or illness, or even the aging of the other.

I’m a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s life is the source from which self-respect springs.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Time is the school in which we learn.

I know what “nothing” means, and I keep playing.

I don’t know what I think until I write.

I don’t want any more reminders of what was, what broke, what was lost, what was wasted.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because nobody remembers the past.

I’ve already lost touch with some of the people I used to be.

Was there ever in anyone’s life a free point in time, devoid of memory, a night when the choice was more than the sum of all previous choices?

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

I am what I am. Looking for reasons is beside the point.

Fear is for what is yet to be lost.

Life changes instantly. The common moment.

There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, so to speak, his life.

Grief has its place, but also its limits.

You have to choose the places you don’t stray from.

There is a point where you go with what you have. Or you won’t.

It’s easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the end.

Read, learn, work, go to literature. Information is control.

How could this have happened when everything was normal?

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

There’s no real way to deal with everything we’ve lost.

Plate tectonics shift, deep currents shift, islands disappear, rooms are forgotten.

I have a hard time maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises is important in a world where everything I’ve been taught seems irrelevant. The point itself is increasingly obscure.

Don’t complain… Don’t complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not just time: it is also, paradoxically, the negation of time.

All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me a few years to figure out what I was. That she was a writer.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only the messages we need to survive.

Memory disappears, memory adjusts, memory adapts to what we think we remember.