#joan didion

[flowerytale]

Joan Didion, from Blue Nights

[mybigbleu]

when joan didion said we are fatally drawn to anyone who offers a way out of ourselves

[metamorphesque]

― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

[caffeinatedcatlover]

Commonplace pages about Joan Didion’s On Keeping a Notebook and the art of Louis Wain

[ilyalivegirl]

this essay by joan didion has completely changed my life i'm planning to print the whole thing and tape it to my work desk so i can stare at it all day

"To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."

[asoftepiloguemylove]

YOU'RE IN MY VEINS, YOU FUCK

Henry Miller from a letter to Brenda Venus Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters of Henry Miller to Brenda Venus // boygenius We're In Love // Francisco de Zurbarán Agnus Dei // Katie Maria I used to be a hole in the ground (via @heavensghost) // Rafael Nicolás Angels Before Man // Céline Sciamma Portrait de la jeune fille en feu // Kate Moss in a text message to Pete Doherty // Sophocles Antigone // Joan Didion South and West // Richard Siken Editors Pages: The Long and Short of It // Japanese Breakfast Boyish // VIVINOS Alien Stage; "ROUND 6" // Li-Young Lee I Loved You Before I Was Born // Hannibal; "Secondo" dir. Vincenzo Natali // Hozier Francesca

[felicitypdf]

"In the ‘60s one either believed that America was being greened or that America was being morally defoliated. You either believed that this was the dawning of the age of Aquarius or you believed that we were on the eve of destruction. I sometimes think that the most malignant aspect of the period was the extent to which everyone dealt exclusively in symbols. Certain artifacts were understood to denote something other than themselves, something supposedly abstract; some positive or negative moral value. And whether the artifact was positively or negatively charged depended not on any objective reality at all but on where you stood, where the polarization had thrown you. Marijuana was a symbol. Long hair was of course a symbol, and so was short hair. Natural foods were a symbol – rice, seaweed, raw milk, the whole litany. I found myself in situations during the late ‘60s where my refusal to give my baby unpasteurized milk was construed as evidence that I must be “on the other side.” Probably an undercover. In fact, it meant nothing except that I had grown up around farms and I had known children who got tuberculosis and brucellosis from drinking raw milk. But this was a period in which everything was understood to have some moral freight, some meaning beyond itself. And in fact, nothing did; that was the peculiarity of the decade. In a way it was very touching, this whole society so starved for meaning that it made totems out of meaningless artifacts. The whole country was like a cargo cult. But it was also very destructive. Because nothing meant what it was supposed to mean."

Joan Didion's 1975 Commencement Address at UC Riverside

[dearlyjess]

sunday morning with didion 📖

[iliveinabighouseonahill]

from my blog to history 🩷🎀

[ambxtxo]

donna tartt’s reading list

In an interview, Tartt lists her favorite authors and the names of a few works. I have listed the most popular works from each author and the specific ones she recommended as well.

Homer

The Iliad

The Odyssey

Greek Poets and Tragedians

Argonautica

Antigone

Prometheus Bound

The Oresteia

Medea

Oedipus Rex

The Bacchae

The Frogs

Dante

Inferno

Purgatorio

Paradiso

Shakespeare

“I went back and read Macbeth and Hamlet during the pandemic”

Macbeth

Hamlet

Dickens

“Dickens was a part of my familial landscape, the air I breathed.”

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

Nabokov

Pale Fire

Lolita

Proust

In Search of Lost Time

Swann’s Way

Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment

The Brothers Karamazov

Yeats

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

Borges

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth

Ethan Frome

Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited

Helena

Salinger

Catcher in the Rye

Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

Orlando

Edward St. Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore

Norwegian Wood

Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Don DeLillo

White Noise

Underworld

W.G. Sebald

Austerlitz

The Rings of Saturn

Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking

The White Album

Other Specific Books

Memoirs d’Outre-Tome by Chateaubriand

Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford

All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski

A Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq

[laurapetrie]

Above all, she is the girl who “feels” things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.

Joan Didion, "Where the Kissing Never Stops" (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

[flowerytale]

Joan Didion, from The Year of Magical Thinking

[newwavesylviaplath]

pretty much yeah

[metamorphesque]

"to endure!"

vincent van gogh ("trees and undergrowth") robert lowell [How will the heart endure?] vincent van gogh [I must endure bad times and the waters will rise, possibly as high as the lips and possibly even higher, how can I know beforehand? But I’ll fight my fight and sell my life dearly and try to win and pull through.] rainer maria rilke [To be loved means to be consumed. To love means to radiate with inexhaustible light. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.] joan didion [Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it.] elena ferrante [maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.] elena ferrante [I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.] han kang [The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.] victor frankl [What is to give light must endure burning.]

[junkienoir]

[salembehindbars]

She might have been annoying but her face always gave.