Joan Didion Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Joan Didion
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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
In fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did. 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.

Joan Didion
I…have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerilla war we never understand.

Joan Didion
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly 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. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

Joan Didion
It is often said that New York is a city of only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

Joan Didion
For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

Joan Didion
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

Joan Didion
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.... Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

Joan Didion
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

Joan Didion
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

Joan Didion
I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.

Joan Didion
You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives,... but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.

Joan Didion
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Joan Didion
In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In later years, you fight because you do.

Joan Didion
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Joan Didion
Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.

Joan Didion
Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

Joan Didion
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion