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Time Quotes by Joan Didion

46 Time quotes by Joan Didion

All Time quotes Joan Didion’s page

A funeral card that tries to pull a moment back shows how memory can feel fragile. Didion wonders whether there is ever a point in time free of past, and she marks the future with bright colored lights as a promise. She also notes how the past fades while the future looks golden.

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Time is the school in which we learn.

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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.

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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

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The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

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“I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.”

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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going…

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The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

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“In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.”

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“Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes.…

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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

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Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

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The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.

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“...nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless…

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“The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they…

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Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment…

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I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to…

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“In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated…

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Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found…

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“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This…

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“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more…

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“What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone…

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“I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor…

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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy…

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Actually, when John died, for the first time I thought - for the first time I realized how old I was, because…

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“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to…

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“We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them…

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“I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to…

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This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to…

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“I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there…

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“Flying to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, "come back," flown…

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“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their…

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“The French called this time of day 'l'heure bleue.' To the English it was 'the gloaming.' The very word 'gloaming' reverberates, echoes…

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“For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was…

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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be…

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“I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for…

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The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past ... Here is the last stop for…

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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more…

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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that…

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You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be…

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In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the…

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More by Joan Didion

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters…

I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid…

Style is character.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

“I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.”

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of…

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies…

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum…

“Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems;…

“By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in…

“I just can't see the upside in this," I heard myself say by way of explanation. Later he said that if John had been…

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent…

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly…