Blue Nights Quotes
FreeBookNotes found 20 important quotes from 8 key chapters of Blue Nights by Joan Didion.
For your reference, we provided these Blue Nights quotes with page numbers using the following version of the book: Blue Nights, Random House LLC, 2011 (208 pages).
To view 2 Short Summaries and 2 Book Reviews for this book, visit our Blue Nights - Summary and Analysis page.
Chapter 2 Quotes
It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napol Chapter 2, Page 13
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember. Chapter 2, Page 13
when we talk about our children what are we saying? Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What it meant to us not to have them? What it meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent? Chapter 2, Page 16
Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings." Chapter 4, Page 30
We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings." Chapter 4, Page 30
A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things," their totems. Chapter 8, Page 44
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. Chapter 8, Page 44
How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see. Chapter 8, Page 46
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see. Chapter 8, Page 46
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. Chapter 8, Page 46
Chapter 10 Quotes
The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other. Chapter 10, Page 53
When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them. Chapter 10, Page 53
The ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear. Chapter 10, Page 53
Once she was born I was never not afraid. Chapter 10, Page 54
"You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember. Chapter 12, Page 64
ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us. Chapter 19, Page 96
Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us. Chapter 19, Page 96
All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to have been abandoned by their natural. They are programmed, by the unique circumstances of their introduction into the family structure, to see abandonment as their role, their fate, the destiny that will overtake them unless they outrun it. Chapter 23, Page 118
Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: Chapter 26, Page 134
Showing 1 - 20 of 20 Quotes