1
I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.Joan Didion
2
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.Joan Didion
3
We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.Joan Didion
4
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.Joan Didion
5
Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.Joan Didion
6
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.Joan Didion
7
In theory momentos 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
8
I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree.... Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies.Joan Didion
9
I put the word "diagnosis" in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a "diagnosis" led to a "cure, " or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.Joan Didion
10
...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.Joan Didion
11
Their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need.Joan Didion
12
A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.Joan Didion
13
I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car. I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.Joan Didion
14
Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.Joan Didion
15
Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.Joan Didion
16
I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.Joan Didion
17
Privilege" is something else." Privilege" is a judgment." Privilege" is an opinion." Privilege" is an accusation.Joan Didion