Joan Didion is an American essayist. In the late 1960s, Didion’s reportage brought Californian subcultures to wider attention. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of rhetoric. Profoundly inspirational Joan Didion quotes will challenge the way you think, and help guide you through any life experience.
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Famous Joan Didion Quotes
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves there lies the great, singular power of self respect. Joan Didion
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. Joan Didion
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. Joan Didion
Do not whine. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. Joan Didion
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. Joan Didion
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose. Joan Didion
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. Joan Didion
Innocence ends when we are stripped of the delusion one likes oneself. Joan Didion
You aren’t sure if you’re making the right decision about anything, ever. Joan Didion
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all. Joan Didion
I couldn’t give away my husband’s shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes I don’t know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do their attachment to the ground, I don’t know but that did have a real resonance for me. Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. Joan Didion
In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. Joan Didion
Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored. Joan Didion
To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone oppressed’ to beat them every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. Joan Didion
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image. Joan Didion
One man’s loose cannon is another’s freedom fight, or, in the local phrase, a man of action, or man of valor. Joan Didion
Style is character. Joan Didion
Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. Joan Didion
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. Joan Didion
Once she was born, I was never not afraid. Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Joan Didion
During the blue nights, you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close and they will, and they do you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is göne. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also it’s warning. Joan Didion
Strength is one of those things you’re supposed to have. You don’t feel that you have it at the time you’re going through it. Joan Didion
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves there lies the great, the singular power of self respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw one runs away to find oneself and finds no one at home. Joan Didion
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one. Joan Didion
A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of mean ing to the driver, which is one reason the place ex hilarates some people and floods others with an amorphous unease. There is about these hours spent in transit a seductive unconnectedness. Joan Didion
Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins. Joan Didion
There was silence. Something real was happening this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant. Joan Didion
There’s a general impulse to distract the grieving person as if you could. Joan Didion
I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen. My image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. Joan Didion
Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before? Joan Didion
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what nothing means, and keep on playing. Joan Didion
The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. Joan Didion
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent. Joan Didion
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento. Joan Didion
By the end of the week, she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. Joan Didion
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Joan Didion
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who takes about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento. Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. Joan Didion
The impulse to write things down is a particularly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. Joan Didion
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. Joan Didion
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. Joan Didion
The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black. Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Joan Didion
To believe in the greater good’ is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. Joan Didion
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Joan Didion
We imagine things that we wouldn’t be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it. Joan Didion
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it. Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. Joan Didion
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. Joan Didion
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Joan Didion
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from. Joan Didion
We all survive more than we think we can. Joan Didion
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves there lies the great, singular power of self respect. Joan Didion
I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political. I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man’s soul. Joan Didion
Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. Joan Didion
The truth is, it’s easier for me to write than talk to express the state I’m in at any time. Joan Didion
That was the year, my twenty eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it. Joan Didion
Memories are what you no longer want to remember. Joan Didion
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image. Joan Didion
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. Joan Didion
I know why we try to keep the dead alive we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Joan Didion
To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism. Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Joan Didion
I lead a very conventional life. Joan Didion
I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose. Joan Didion
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream. Joan Didion
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember. Joan Didion
My mother gave teas the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother gave teas. All of their friends gave teas, each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See’s. Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. Joan Didion
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen. Joan Didion
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. Joan Didion
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends. Joan Didion
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. Joan Didion
I don’t lead a writer’s life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. Joan Didion
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Joan Didion
I lead a very conventional life. I don’t lead a writer’s life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn’t lead a writer’s life at all. Joan Didion
The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language. Joan Didion
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. Joan Didion
I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History. Joan Didion
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. Joan Didion
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. Joan Didion
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from. Joan Didion
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self respect springs. Joan Didion
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask. Joan Didion
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? Joan Didion
Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. Joan Didion
You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that. Joan Didion
Self respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having,has a price. Joan Didion
