Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with โ or maybe overly focused on โ the idea that they canโt display self-pity, they have to be strong. Actually there are a lot of reasons why you are going to feel sorry for yourself, but thatโs your first concern.
Joan Didionwe are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Joan DidionYou think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
Joan Didion