Some of us feel an overwhelming desire for a child and some of us don’t.
–Joan Didion Blue Nights
Tag: Joan Didion
On being a parent
When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.
–Joan Didion Blue Nights
In the moment
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.
–Joan Didion Blue Nights
The difference between grief and mourning
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.
–Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
About the shallowness of sanity
…the shallowness of sanity.
—The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
How to read poetry
On the flyleaf of the anthology there was written the name Dunne, in small careful handwriting, and then, in the same handwriting, blue ink, fountain-pen blue ink, these guides to study: 1) What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? 2) What thought or reflection does the experience lead us to? 3) What mood, feeling, emotion is stirred or created by the poem as a whole?
—The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Bewildered Creatures 