Joan Didion Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Joan Didion
Joan Didion Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Joan Didion on Wise Famous Quotes.
She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.
I had forgotten this dedication. I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through. I
Can you evade the dying of the brightness?
Or do you evade only its warning?
Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
Or do you evade only its warning?
Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
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.
There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden.
Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.
I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.
I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.
Privilege" is something else.
"Privilege" is a judgment.
"Privilege" is an opinion.
"Privilege" is an accusation.
"Privilege" is a judgment.
"Privilege" is an opinion.
"Privilege" is an accusation.
I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.
After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire. - Donald Rumsfeld in Year of Magical Thinking
I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.
I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.
On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.
Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?
Some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves
there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice
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.
I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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.
Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.
Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
I had never before understood what "despair" meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.
("Tell me," a rabbi asked Daniel Bell when he said, as a child, that he did not believe in God. "Do you think God cares?")
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.