Joan Didion
Definition.com
California is a place where the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here is where we run out of continent.
Definition.com
Death is medicalized today such that it now mostly happens in the hospitals. It happens away from where we deal with it directly and has thus become a rather uncommon affair.
Definition.com
Death is not something that puts an end to the impulse to tell a loved one something. What ends is the possibility of response.
Definition.com
The Death of a parent dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago.
Definition.com
The Disaster is, when a sudden disaster, such that we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were when the unthinkable occurred, how everything preceding it is often so ordinary and normal and unremarkable that one is prevented from truly believing it happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.
Definition.com
Grief is a place none of us can imagine. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.
Definition.com
Grief is passive. Grief happens, in contrast to mourning, which, as the act of dealing with grief, requires attention.
Definition.com
Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of waves.
Definition.com
Grief is an experience in which you secretly think you're crazy, because you realize you are thinking things that don't make sense.
Definition.com
Grief is odd in that we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were when the unthinkable occurred, how everything preceding it is often so ordinary and normal and unremarkable that one is prevented from truly believing it happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.
Definition.com
Grief is the frustration of numerous impulses, thoughts, feelings, and actions that are habitually directed to one's loved one as a matter to course, only to realize that the target is now gone. By force of habit, one keeps on fitting an arrow to the string and then remembering and having to lay the bow down.
Definition.com
Innocence is a period which is at an end when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Definition.com
Interviewing is an activity in which the interviewer's presence necessarily runs counter to a person's best interests. And it always does : Writers are always selling somebody out.