Quotes by Joan Didion

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

“The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the peop...”

“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.”

“Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy. That is not a remarkable thing to say...”

“That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither th...”

“Of course the activistsnot those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchichad long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we ...”

“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.”

“What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one...”

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justi...”

“Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?”

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

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the d...”

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

“I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually...”

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

“As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed c...”

“This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was ne...”

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

“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.”