The American writer Joan Didion was known for her keen insights into human nature, as well as her unique and stylish prose. She was writing for over 50 years, and her work has been published in magazines such as “The New Yorker” and “Vogue.”
About Joan Didion
Joan Didion was born in 1934 in Sacramento, California. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and went on to work as a journalist for Vogue magazine. In addition to her writing, she also wrote screenplays, plays, and essays which were published in various newspapers and magazines.
As an essayist and novelist, she was deeply interested in how culture shapes our lives and how we interact with each other. Known for her direct style of prose and sharp wit, Didion’s work has been highly praised by critics for its insight into human nature.
Therefore, we’ve gathered 200 of her most inspiring and thought-provoking quotes below.
Joan Didion Quotes
- “We write to discover what we think.” – Joan Didion
- “Time is the school in which we learn” – Joan Didion
- “Writers are always selling somebody out.” – Joan Didion
- “I’m only myself in front of my typewriter.” – Joan Didion
- “We tell each other stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion
- “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” – Joan Didion
- “Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.” – Joan Didion
- “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” – Joan Didion
- “when she drank she did not dream.” – Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
- “Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Information was control.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “The fear is for what is still to be lost.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Once she was born, I was never not afraid.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Ten watercolors were made from that star.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?” – Joan Didion
- “Everything’s going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.” – Joan Didion
- “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…” – Joan Didion
- “There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.” – Joan Didion
- “In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Time is the school in which we learn. ” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” – Joan Didion, Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations
- “There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” – Joan Didion, Where I Was From
- “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?” – Joan Didion
- “Tell me what matters,” BZ said. Nothing,” Maria said.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “Mourning has its place but also its limits.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself,” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.” – Joan Didion
- “The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.” – Joan Didion, Where I Was From
- “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “It is hard to remember what we came to remember.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.” – Joan Didion
- “Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having,has a price.” – Joan Didion
- “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it […]” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “How could this have happened when everything was normal?” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “For forty years I saw myself thru John’s eyes. I did not age.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.” – Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
- “I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
- “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “It was the kind of Sunday to make one ache for Monday morning.” – Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook
- “I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere” – Joan Didion
- “Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “…the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” – Joan Didion
- “Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” – Joan Didion, Where I Was From
- “I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “Did mothers always try to press unto their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed. Did I?” – Joan Didion
- “We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be. Otherwise they turn up unannounced.” – Joan Didion
- “It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
- “That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one’s memory.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “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
- “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
- “En épocas difíciles, me habían dicho desde niña, lee, aprende, prepárate, recurre a la literatura.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes.” – Joan Didion, Where I Was From
- “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” – Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
- “I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative,” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.” – Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
- “Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voice” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “…some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.” – Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
- “Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship’s a little truer That’s where the West begins.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
- “…the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.” – Joan Didion
- “I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “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.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “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.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “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?” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “You’re a professional. Finish the piece. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it…Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it.” – Joan Didion
- “One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.” – Joan Didion
- “I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “They are very gracious and very enthusiastic, and give such an appearance of health and happiness and hope that I sometimes find it difficult to talk to them.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “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.” – Joan Didion
- “Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “In was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested – ask any doctor – that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.” – Joan Didion , The White Album
- “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
- “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.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
- “Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “It’s not you. It’s anyone. Sometimes I don’t want anyone around. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.” – Joan Didion, Run River
- “I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
- “People who respect themselves are welling to accept the risk…they are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.” – Joan Didion
- “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” – Joan Didion
- “There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me. I had allowed other people to think he was dead. I had allowed him to be buried alive.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
- “it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “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
- “NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word “nothing” were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “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.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” – Joan Didion
- “I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?” – Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays
- “I promised myself that I would maintain momentum. “Maintain momentum” was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown. In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it. In fact I had no idea what it was.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we’ve learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “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 place had been so attenuated.” – Joan Didion, Vintage Didion
- “No one who has ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of a the provincial adolescent.” – Joan Didion, Political Fictions
- “…nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Everybody says I’m politically naive, and I am,” she says after a while. It is something she says frequently to people she does not know. “So are the people running politics, or we wouldn’t be in wars, would we.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
- “I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “Mr. Schorer, a man of infinite kindness to and acuity about his students divined intuitively that my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that I would never be.” – Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean
- “if someone “chose” you, what does that tell you? Doesn’t it tell you that you were available to be “chosen”? Doesn’t it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world? The one who “chose” you? And the other who didn’t?” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent” – Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry
- “By ‘the long view’ I believe she meant history. Or more exactly, the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it, that Inez’s experience had tended to deny.” – Joan Didion, Democracy
- “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” – Joan Didion
- “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 feel this faith in the future.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “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 dead, let them go, keep them dead. ” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…The way I write is who I am, or have become…” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach… I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “The death of a parent, he wrote, ‘despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago…” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.” – Joan Didion, Where I Was From
- “People who respect themselves…are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds. That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.” – Joan Didion
- “A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?” – Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook
- “Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems; all of these are fundamentally influenced by brain function and neurotransmitters.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.” – Joan Didion
- “She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much.” – Joan Didion, Run River
- “But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind’s whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
- “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.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death—could now be declared in valid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
- “He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “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 justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “At Beth Israel there had been Acinetobacter baumannii, which was resistant to vancomycin. “That’s how you know it’s a hospital infection,” I recall being told by a doctor I asked at Columbia Presbyterian. “If it’s resistant to vanc it’s hospital. Because vanc only gets used in hospital settings.” – Joan Didion
- “we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- “here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.” – Joan Didion
- “I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: “I exist very nicely between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut.'” And even a third way: “It doesn’t present as pain,” I once heard an oncological surgeon say of cancer.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrustive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” – Joan Didion
- “During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.” – Joan Didion, Blue Nights
- “You talk crazy any more and I’ll leave. Leave. For Christ’s sake leave. She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. All right. Don’t, he would say then. Don’t. Why do you say those things. Why do you fight. He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. To find out if you’re alive.” – Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
- “Everyone was in scrubs. I noticed one man who was not in scrubs. “Is this the wife,” he said to the driver. Then he looked at me. “I’m your social worker.” And I guess that was when I knew. That’s something else to remember. If they give you a social worker, you’re in trouble.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play
- “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves–there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” – Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
- “I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty or twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” – Joan Didion
- “The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness…. To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “It occurs to me as I write that this “white light,” usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. “Everything went white,” those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint.” – Joan Didion
Wrapping Up
Through her work, the late Joan Didion explored a range of topics from the creative process to grief. Through powerful and poignant writing, she was able to express complex emotions in an engaging and thought-provoking manner. Whether she was discussing art or illness, her words had profound impact and still continue to resonate with readers today. Her legacy as an author, journalist and social critic will be remembered for years to come.
Thank you for reading! May Joan Didion’s work continue to inspire us all.
