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Top Joan Didion Quotes

Browse top 135 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Joan Didion.

Favorite Joan Didion Quotes

1. "I write to know what I think." ~ Joan Didion
2. "You couldn't pay for her hats,' her father, a ship's captain, had told her suitors by way of discouragement, and perhaps they had all been discouraged but my grandfather, an innocent from the Georgetown Divide who read books." ~ Joan Didion
3. "This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning." ~ Joan Didion
4. "I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted." ~ Joan Didion
5. "Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; 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. 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
6. "I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: "I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.'"And even a third way: "It doesn't present as pain," I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer." ~ Joan Didion
7. "Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count." ~ Joan Didion
8. "The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here." ~ Joan Didion
9. "The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured." ~ Joan Didion
10. "Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice" ~ Joan Didion
11. "I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay." ~ Joan Didion
12. "I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should." ~ Joan Didion
13. "Quintana's christening was in 1966, this Christian Dior show was two years later, 1968: 1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States but they were for women who presented themselves a certain way the same time. It was a way of looking, it was a way of being. It was a period. What became of that way of looking, that way of being, that time, that period? What became of the women smoking cigarettes in their Chanel suits and their David Webb bracelets, what became of Diana holding the champagne flute and the one of Sara Mankiewicz's Minton plates? What became of Sara Mankiewicz's Minton plates?" ~ Joan Didion
14. "After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave. Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself." ~ Joan Didion
15. "Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow." ~ Joan Didion
16. "We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées. We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker." ~ Joan Didion
17. "Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara." ~ Joan Didion
18. "How could this have happened when everything was normal?" ~ Joan Didion
19. "their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need." ~ Joan Didion
20. "Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left." ~ Joan Didion
21. "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
22. "We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings." ~ Joan Didion
23. "Mourning has its place but also its limits." ~ Joan Didion
24. "That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing." ~ Joan Didion
25. "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
26. "Let me just be in the ground.Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep." ~ Joan Didion
27. "As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear." ~ Joan Didion
28. "A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me?" ~ Joan Didion
29. "My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. 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
30. "Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs." ~ Joan Didion
31. "I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots." ~ Joan Didion
32. "Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone." ~ Joan Didion
33. "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
34. "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes." ~ Joan Didion
35. "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
36. "Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself." ~ Joan Didion
37. "Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.Information is control." ~ Joan Didion
38. "I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world." ~ Joan Didion
39. "Everything's going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose." ~ Joan Didion
40. "Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone." ~ Joan Didion
41. "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
42. "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
43. "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." ~ Joan Didion
44. "Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price." ~ Joan Didion
45. "Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?" ~ Joan Didion
46. "I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am." ~ Joan Didion
47. "I put the word "diagnosis" in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a "diagnosis" led to a "cure," or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility." ~ Joan Didion
48. "It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not." ~ Joan Didion
49. "The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried." ~ Joan Didion
50. "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. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water." ~ Joan Didion
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There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature. Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners."
Author: Antonio Gaudi

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