Joan Didion Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Joan Didion

Joan Didion Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Joan Didion quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

I never think people are too careful with me. — Joan Didion

Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon. — Joan Didion

I had forgotten this dedication. I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through. I — Joan Didion

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know. — Joan Didion

The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. — Joan Didion

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

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento. — Joan Didion

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

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

Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is "nothing. — Joan Didion

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again. — Joan Didion

Style is character. — Joan Didion

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left. — Joan Didion

Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back. — Joan Didion

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

For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I. — Joan Didion

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

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

Her choices, all.
Sentimental choices, things she remembered.
I remembered them too. — Joan Didion

Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss. — Joan Didion

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

Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice — Joan Didion

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. — Joan Didion

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves
there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. — Joan Didion

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. — Joan Didion

Writers are only rarely likable. — Joan Didion

These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. — Joan Didion

When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color. — Joan Didion

I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears. — Joan Didion

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. — Joan Didion

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that. — Joan Didion

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. — Joan Didion

I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am. — Joan Didion

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be — Joan Didion

They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino. — Joan Didion

Call me the author. — Joan Didion

We all remember what we need to remember. — Joan Didion

1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States ... — Joan Didion

There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia. — Joan Didion

I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos. — Joan Didion

The bereaved must be urged to "sit in a sunny room," preferably one with an open fire. — Joan Didion

You see what the word of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness. — Joan Didion

We all have the same dreams. — Joan Didion

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else.
I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not. — Joan Didion

I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right. — Joan Didion

I write to know what I think. — Joan Didion

If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum. — Joan Didion

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. — Joan Didion

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. — Joan Didion

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

Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. — Joan Didion

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. — Joan Didion

I don't really get things very ... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down. — Joan Didion

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." — Joan Didion

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. — Joan Didion

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. — Joan Didion

one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen. — Joan Didion

A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell. — Meghan Daum

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 — Joan Didion

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

Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento? — Joan Didion

Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. — Joan Didion

California: The west coast of Iowa. — Joan Didion

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

pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again. — Joan Didion

I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should. — Joan Didion

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

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

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one. — Joan Didion

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? — Joan Didion

Someday it all comes. — Joan Didion

Do not whine ... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone. — Joan Didion

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

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part. — Joan Didion

The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted. — Joan Didion

No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely. — Joan Didion

The way you got sideswiped was by going back. I — Joan Didion

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

Everything's going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose. — Joan Didion

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. — Joan Didion

I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life. — Joan Didion

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

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. — Joan Didion

It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it. — Joan Didion

Information is control. — Joan Didion

Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American. — Joan Didion

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

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. — Joan Didion

Let me just be in the ground.
Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep. — Joan Didion

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

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. — Joan Didion

I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point. — Joan Didion

I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter. — Joan Didion

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language. — Joan Didion

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

I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm. — Joan Didion

The past could be jettisoned ... but seeds got carried. — Joan Didion

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. — Joan Didion

Memories are what you no longer want to remember. — Joan Didion

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe. — Joan Didion