Marla > Marla's Quotes

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense,” C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. “It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable fron-tierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“At a point during the summer it occurred to me that I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die?”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Just an ordinary day. “And then—gone.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. 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

“Death,” he wrote, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to you.
And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you.
That's what I'm here to tell you.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play

“I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life--both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections--have all vanished.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Bringing him back” had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. “Seeing it clearly” did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.           I”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“In the beginning was simplicity.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Many of the early explorers in my field—Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, John Bowlby—concluded that early trauma, even dating back to preverbal eras, takes its toll, often an indelible toll, on the comfort, the ease, the self-esteem, of the adult, even into late stages of life.”
― Irvin Yalom, A Matter of Death and Life: Love, Loss and What Matters in the End

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“What terrible things we do to those we love!”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Whereas apes must learn every skill they eventually acquire through trial-and-error and without a parent or other group member actively teaching them, humans can much more effectively build on the accumulated knowledge of previous generations.”
― Svante Pääbo, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

“Painters, poets and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind’s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.”
― Stephen Fry, Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold