by Joan Didion
“Was it only by dreaming that I could find out what I thought?”
— Joan Didion
“I recall that John and I took different views of what had happened in 1987.
As he saw it, he now had a death sentence, temporarily suspended.
He often said, after the 1987 angioplasty, that he now knew how he was going to die.
As I saw it, the timing had been providential, the intervention successful, the problem solved, the mechanism fixed.
You no more know how you’re going to die than I do or anyone else does, I remember saying.
I realize now that his was the more realistic view.” — Joan Didion
“A significant difference, but not one that took me anywhere I needed to be.”
— Joan Didion
“Time is the school in which we learn.”
— Joan Didion
Collected lines from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, kept here for rhythm and reflection rather than review.