Joan Didion - Tumblr Posts
sitting in washington square park feeling like the only person with good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale here
and for a before bed snack i had an apple and a bonne maman creme brûlée in a tiny glass jar that i opened in the most violent way possible
kafka had his diaries, didion had her notebooks, plath wrote in journals, and i have my tumblr blog
“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“I had learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.”
— Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking
Friday, 2nd of February
Vector calculus revision
Finish electromagnetism work sheet
French, Italian and Russian podcasts
Finish cultural and linguistic studies essay
Dynamics assigned reading
Finish reading ‘Play it as it lays’ by Joan Didion
{Notes of the day: As of recent I have had this devious idea of actually going out and study in a local café while sipping on some overpriced coffee harbouring in my mind… The constant awareness of being watched will never allow me to do such a thing, it not only affects my work but it also marks me for the rest of the day, but a girl can dream I presume. I’ll probably go to the library soon, I have books to return and crows to watch.}
“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
— Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking
“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”
God I love Joan Didion 📘🖤
"Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember."
— Blue Nights, Joan Didion.
"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."
-Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion
Play it as it lays, Joan Didion
"Why was she crying, he wanted to know. Because he made her so happy, she said, and for that moment believed it."
Inktober, day twenty-nine
Joan Didion
Ink / pen / graphite / 2015
Joan Didion on Self-Respect, Vogue Magazine “People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of a moral nerve; They display what was once called character… Character — The willingness to accept the responsibility for one’s own life.”