Joan Didion Quotes

Quotes about:

• I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

  Joan Didion

  Couple, People, Used

  Joan Didion (1968). “Slouching towards Bethlehem”

  11 Copy quote

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

  Joan Didion

  Memories, Denial, Only Time

  Joan Didion (2007). “The Year of Magical Thinking”, p.197, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

• I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

  Joan Didion

  Mean, Games, Aces

  Joan Didion (2011). “Play it as it Lays”, p.14, HarperCollins UK

  4 Copy quote
• 

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

  Joan Didion

  Life, Respect, Self Esteem

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Sep 15, 2011

  70 Copy quote
• 

  We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

  Joan Didion

  People, Nodding, Attractive

  Joan Didion (2006). “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction”, Everyman's Library

  47 Copy quote

• What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you just to live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm telling you to live in it. Try and get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.

  Joan Didion

  Life, Moving, Believe

  9 Copy quote

• We write to discover what we think.

  Joan Didion

  Writing, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• We are the stories we tell ourselves

  Joan Didion

  Stories

  9 Copy quote

• You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

  Joan Didion

  Commitment, Powerful Women, Walks

  Joan Didion (2011). “A Book of Common Prayer”, p.256, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

• There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.

  Joan Didion

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 03, 2011

  41 Copy quote

• To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

  Joan Didion

  Jealousy, Self, Cures

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 17, 2011

  65 Copy quote

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

  Joan Didion

  Thinking, Self, Mastery

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.91, Zola Books

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Joan Didion

  Notebook, Lonely, Children

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.98, Zola Books

  8 Copy quote

• Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

  Joan Didion

  Dream, Listening, Want

  8 Copy quote

• I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

  Joan Didion

  Night, Thinking, Doors

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Aug 28, 2016

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Respect, Lying, Self

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.108, Zola Books

  16 Copy quote

• People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

  Joan Didion

  Spring, Responsibility, Character

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 09, 2011

  17 Copy quote

• We all survive more than we think we can.

  Joan Didion

  Thinking

  17 Copy quote

• Anything worth having has its price.

  Joan Didion

  Anything Worth Having

  Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.106, Zola Books

  13 Copy quote
• 

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

  Joan Didion

  Memories, Nodding, Never Forget

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jun 24, 2011

  35 Copy quote

• We tell ourselves stories in order to live...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. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

  Joan Didion

  Suicide, Order, Multiple Choice

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 13, 2011

  26 Copy quote

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

  Joan Didion

  Complaining, More Time, Work Harder

  28 Copy quote

• Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

  Joan Didion

  Memories, Thinking, Remember

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Jul 04, 2016

  35 Copy quote

• Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

  Joan Didion

  Life, Dinner, Ends

  Joan Didion (2009). “The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play”, p.4, Vintage

  12 Copy quote

Page 1 of 11

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin