Joan Didion Quotes

I have absolutely no sense of my success whatsoever, in fact, I only have a sense of not doing what I intended to do. I don't know who I am.

September had never been betrayed before. She did not even know what to call the feeling in her chest, so bitter and sour. Poor child. There is always a first time, and it is never the last time.

She didn't feel thirty. But then again again, what was being thirty supposed to feel like? When she was younger, thirty seemed so far away, she thought that a woman of that age would be so wise and knowledgeable, so settled in her life with a husband and children and a career. She had none of those things. She still felt as clueless as she had felt when she was twenty, only with a few more gray hairs and crow's feet around her eyes.

Are you coming down with something?" Mom asks. And just for the tiniest of seconds, I wonder what would happen if I told them the truth. That school is nothing like I imagined it would be. That I'm not the girl in the catalog at all. I'm not a Happy College Student. I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

I feel like there's a moment, in every young girl's life, whether it happens with your family, or a tragedy or death in your family, or a relationship, where there's a turning point where you go from extremely hopeful and cheery to wondering whether you are okay with where you are. That's always awkward.

Simon, would you still care for me if you discovered I was not who I say I am?" What do you mean?" I mean would you still care for me, no matter what you came to know?" What a thing to ponder. I don't know what to say." The answer is no. He does not need to say it. With a sigh, Simon digs at the fire with the iron poker. Bits of the charred log fall away, revealing the angry insides. they flare orange for a moment, then quiet down again. After three tries, he gives up. I'm afraid this fire's had it." I can see a few embers remaining. "No, I think not. If..." He sighs, and it says everything.

Adults always wonder what to say and how to say it when they're talking to a child. You want to be wise, but all you are is a child yourself in a larger body. Nothing is ever what it seems. The things that you think you know are never certain. I know that now. I wish that I didn't, but I do.

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away.

I felt suddenly cruel, like I´d told dmall children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their Mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed.

She tried to be someone people liked. She tried to be someone people disliked. But all I became was someone who didn't succeed with anything I tried to be.

She seems sort of lost.' I thought, Lost how? How am I lost? Suddenly I felt lost.

When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.

What are men? Children who doubt.

Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.

Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.

Nobody knows who I am or what I do. Not even I. Don Juan Matus

In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?

No one knows what I am and really, I wonder if I do, at the end of the day.

Welcome to adulthood." Cob said. "Every child finds a day when the realize that adults can be weak and wrong just like everyone else. After that day, you are an adult. Like it or not.

The saddest moment in a child's life is not when he learns that Santa Claus isn't real, it's when he learns that Vince Russo is.

I wondered how much of me would be left after tomorrow.