Notes to John Quotes

“...the history of everybody's 20s and 30s, after all, is one of the awareness of doors closing. At one age – very young – it occurs to you that you'll never be a ballet dancer. At a later age, you think you'll never be this, never be that. You make your life around what you have left - what doors haven't closed.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“You don't always have to look ahead for the bump in the road. Your anticipating the bump won't make the bump disappear. It'll still be there. You're afraid you won't be prepared to deal with it if you don't anticipate it, but you will. Your adrenalin kicks in and you deal with it. And meanwhile, you've been happy, which gives you more strength to deal with it.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“That’s the one thing you’re most afraid of losing. You don’t understand living without control. Which is another way of saying you don’t understand not having to be right.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“I’m saying you can’t let yourself not be. You can’t let yourself make mistakes, be human. Having to be right is like the Midas touch. You think it would be wonderful if everything you touched turned to gold, then you find you’ve turned to gold yourself, stopped being human.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“That’s a strategy – setting everything else aside and going to work – that’s worked very well for you. It’s still the best way to allay anxiety known to man. Work. Better than drugs, better even than alcohol. But she doesn’t have the faith in her work that you have in yours. When she does, she’ll be for all intents and purposes cured.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“I see your point. You could be making the child dependent on the positive feedback he or she might not get. Whereas the feedback for ‘doing the right thing’ comes from within, the child can award it to him or herself.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“There was a fear that the energy she needed to undertake this life would go into the attachment, that the attachment had in the first case and could in this case serve as a kind of way out.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“You’re very strong. You’ll be amazed what you can deal with if you’re doing something you want to be doing.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“I can see that as thrilling,” he said. “Liberating. I could make a case that you walked in here and sat down and for the first time felt liberated enough to cry, tears of joy. You’d found something you thought could truly engage you, enable you to set your concerns to one side. Which is what you’ve needed to do all year. It was the clearest thing about you. You needed to work, and work in a meaningful way. It’s not selfish. It’s crucial to your own survival.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“I said I had then started thinking about where the capacity to compartmentalize came from. I said I thought it came from the basic way-west story that had been drummed into me as a child. You drop baggage, you jettison the piano and the books and your grandmother’s rosewood chest, or you don’t get to Independence Rock in time to make the Sierra before snowfall. I said I had come to see a lot of contradictions in this story, the principal one being, where were you when you got there? What did you actually have left?”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“What you’re saying is that she doesn’t try to be. Quite clearly, she’s manipulating you and her father to the point where you don’t know which way to turn.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“I also said that, on the contrary, as I had mentioned to him in passing in some other context, I had often felt over the years that I was somehow placed between the two of you, being conciliatory to each of you, keeping you from confrontation.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“your very natural anxiety in this situation so much more acute than that of, say, your husband. It goes beyond what it is. It goes back to something else.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John