Joan Didion Short Quotes

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

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

Joan Didion
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

Joan Didion
I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

Joan Didion
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

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

Joan Didion
In Houston the air was warm and rich and suggestive of fossil fuel.

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

Joan Didion
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it.

Joan Didion
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

Joan Didion
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

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

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

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

Joan Didion
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

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

Joan Didion
In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

Joan Didion
Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

Joan Didion
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

Joan Didion
Self respect... is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price.

Joan Didion
Lancaster, California... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa'.

Joan Didion
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

Joan Didion
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

Joan Didion
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.

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
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Joan Didion
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

Joan Didion
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means.

Joan Didion