Joan Didion Quotes

Joan Didion offers poetic reflections on writing and life, urging readers to confront memory and desire.

30 quotes

1. 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.

2. Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

3. 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.

4. In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

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

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

7. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

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

9. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

10. Writers are always selling somebody out.

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

12. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

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

14. “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

15. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

16. I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

17. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

18. My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies extruded from a metal press and pastel bonbons ordered from See's.

19. I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

20. To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism.

21. I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.

22. Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with — or maybe overly focused on — the idea that they can’t display self-pity, they have to be strong. Actually there are a lot of reasons why you are going to feel sorry for yourself, but that’s your first concern.

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

24. Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.

25. All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.

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

27. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past ... Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

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

29. 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.

30. 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.