Joan Didion Quotes
1934–2021 United States
Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer known as a novelist, journalist and prose stylist.
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Also known as: Didion, Joan
Random Joan Didion quote
15 quotes
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.
Why I Write (1975)
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.
Why I Write (1975)
Writers are always selling somebody out.
A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation.
Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
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.
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?
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.
Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.