To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
Joan DidionRead
We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We create narratives to find meaning in our experiences, even in tragedy.
In this quote, Joan Didion reflects on the human tendency to construct stories as a means of making sense of our lives and the chaotic world around us. She suggests that through storytelling, we impose order on the randomness of experience, allowing us to find lessons, morals, and insights even in the most difficult or tragic events.
Themes
StoriesMeaningExperienceNarrativeLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about coping with loss, one might quote Didion to illustrate how narratives help us make sense of tragedy.
More from Joan Didion
All quotes →The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.
Joan DidionRead
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
Joan DidionRead
It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
Joan DidionRead
I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?
Joan DidionRead
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
Joan DidionRead
Similar quotes
I was originally supposed to become an engineer but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a loathsome capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me.
Albert EinsteinRead
It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutalized his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion.
Robert SoutheyRead
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
David Foster WallaceRead
Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
Gunter GrassRead
But in the expression of the countenance, which was beaming all over with smiles, there still lurked (incomprehensible anomalyl) that fitful strain of melancholy which will ever be found inseparable from the perfection of the beautiful.
Edgar Allan PoeRead
If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you
Haruki MurakamiRead