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JOAN DIDION

Portrait of Joan Didion from the Joan Didion archive.

JOAN DIDION
QUOTES

Line by line, sentence by sentence, we are mesmerized by her words.

Read, download, and share quotations from Joan Didion’s essays, novels, and interviews.

JOAN DIDION BOOKS

Joan Didion Let Me Tell You What I Mean Book Cover

Joan Didion Vintage Didion Book Cover

Joan Didion South and West Book Cover

Joan Didion We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Book Cover

Joan Didion Political Fictions Book Cover

Joan Didion The White Album Book Cover

Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem Book Cover

Joan Didion After Henry Book Cover

Joan Didion Blue Nights Book Cover

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion Where I was From

Joan Didion Salvador Book Cover

Joan Didion Miami Book Cover

Joan Didion Run River Book Cover

Joan Didion The Last Thing He Wanted Book Cover

Joan Didion A Book of Common Prayer Book Cover

Joan Didion Play It As It Lays

Joan Didion Democracy Book Cover

Cover of Joan Didion’s Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11

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.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

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.

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.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

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.

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.

We were just crazy kids” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself. I wanted everything in the picture.

Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city…

Eight million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.

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.

In retrospect, we know how to write when we begin.

Every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, ever brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character.

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.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.

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 image.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.