Joan Didion Quotes

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

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.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

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

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

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

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

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.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.

I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day.

...some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.

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.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.