In the Roman Catholic calendar, virtually every day is a feast day in honor of this saint or that, famous or not, and in a strange sense it's similar on the Internet — every day belongs to some famous secular saint or sinner.
Today, Julie Cart of the LA Times reminds us that her heroine Joan Didion turned seventy-nine, an excellent excuse to brush up on some of Didion's most striking insights, and read some wonderful (and sometimes familiar) quotes via Into the Gloss.
The first sentence of this passage is very famous, in Hollywood at least, but rest shows Didion's toughness — her refusal to retreat from the facts.
“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.”
Love this pic, too, via David Ulin:
Bonus quote for reporters:
“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.”
Kit Stolz 