Joan Didion, The Year Of Magical Thinking Quotes

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

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.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.