Joan Didion Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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
Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.

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

Joan Didion
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Joan Didion
That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

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 had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

Joan Didion
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Joan Didion
I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.

Joan Didion
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

Joan Didion
What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?

Joan Didion