Joan Didion Quotes

When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.

We all have the same dreams.

Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

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

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

In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.

I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.

I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent to children.

I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

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

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.

[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.

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

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.

Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself.

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

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

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?

...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

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>

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.

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.

Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.

Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

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.

Privilege" is something else."Privilege" is a judgment."Privilege" is an opinion."Privilege" is an accusation.

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 what I want and what I fear.