Joan Didion Quotes

Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

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

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

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.

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.

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

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

I’ve learned that you can keep going, long after you think you can’t.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

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 own image.

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

What happened in 1968 was that the self-consciousness that had begun to grow in San Francisco and Berkeley and other places, simply flowered.

A proper diagnosis is often half the cure.

I never liked the sudden and hysterical moments of women’s liberation in the early ’70s any better than the sudden and hysterical moments of women’s liberation in the ’20s, when women’s lib was pants, bras, and marriage certificates.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it?

A writer is always selling somebody out.

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

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 own image.

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

There’s a disconnect between the word and the deed. All the things that women have done silently for years and years and years are not really considered to be work.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind, there would have been no reason to write.

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.

Let me underline that phrase once again: the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.

All I’ve ever wanted is my own life.

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

Time and time again I have gone to bed telling myself, Tomorrow, you must wake up; you have things to do, things that cannot be put off; tomorrow you must wake up alive again, ready to start again. Once, in the merciful absence of that identity I sometimes wish would leave me entirely alone but never does, I thought of waking. I thought of waking along San Francisco waterfront, in sunlight so thick it seemed alive. I thought of walking, tired and sore from the effort of keeping the body moving, down one of those hills that by now I know so well that I could walk them eyes closed.

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

I can remember a summer when the only worry was whether I could eat ice cream, in the park on a Thursday night.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is.

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.

I write to find out what I’m thinking. Do I like the world I live in? Or do I think it should be different?

A leader is someone to whom you bring a matter, and they take not a moment but weeks or even longer before they respond.

We forget not only our pleasures but our embarrassments.

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

It is a ceremonial joining of our most conscious selves with all that has gone before.

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

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

At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.

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.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen.

I write to find out what I’m thinking. Do I like the world I live in? Or do I think it should be different?

I can’t help but envy the people who inherited these stones, these trees, these wild labyrinths of week-long rains, or these summer nights where you marvel at the sound of traffic disappearing two miles away in the black or sky, because chance led your parents to just such a city when they were like me, in the mood.

A writer’s instruments are also her confidantes. She comes to know them well while she works with them, sometimes even to enjoy them—writing feasts and pen renewals and the way the sharp point hits the paper and etches itself into the soft skin underneath, drawing faint blood.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you.

It is possible to swim beyond ourselves in islands found only and precisely in memory.