Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.”

— Joan Didion

152. “To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”

— Joan Didion

153. “There’s a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn’t been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.”

— Joan Didion

154. “The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.”

— Joan Didion

155. “We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.”

— Joan Didion

156. “It was the kind of Sunday to make one ache for Monday morning.”

— Joan Didion

157. “On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.”

— Joan Didion

158. “Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present, or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.”

— Joan Didion

159. “Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me – how really tenuous our sanity is.”

— Joan Didion

160. “Did mothers always try to press unto their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed. Did I?”

— Joan Didion

161. “It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.”

— Joan Didion

162. “This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

— Joan Didion

163. “Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.”

— Joan Didion

164. “Time is the school in which we learn.”

— Joan Didion

165. “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

166. “A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.”

— Joan Didion

167. “In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.”

— Joan Didion

168. “One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks ”stardust” or “caesar’s palace.” Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with “real” life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. But Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.”

— Joan Didion

169. “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

170. “Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. 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

171. “One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they’re crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don’t make sense.”

— Joan Didion

172. “So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.”

— Joan Didion

173. “Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.”

— Joan Didion

174. “Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.”

— Joan Didion

175. “Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”

— Joan Didion

176. “Nei momenti difficili, mi era stato insegnato fin dall’infanzia, leggi, impara, datti da fare, rivolgiti alla letteratura. Essere informati significava non perdere il controllo.”

— Joan Didion

177. “I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.”

— Joan Didion

178. “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

179. “I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

— Joan Didion

180. “In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.”

— Joan Didion

181. “As it happened, I didn’t grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.”

— Joan Didion

182. “It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.”

— Joan Didion

183. “She never puts on any weight, you’ll notice that’s often true of selfish women.”

— Joan Didion

184. “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”

— Joan Didion

185. “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

186. “They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.”

— Joan Didion

187. “In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.”

— Joan Didion

188. “The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.”

— Joan Didion

189. “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.”

— Joan Didion

190. “The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.”

— Joan Didion

191. “Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations.”

— Joan Didion

192. “There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.”

— Joan Didion

193. “The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.”

— Joan Didion

194. “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.”

— Joan Didion

195. “Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”

— Joan Didion

196. “Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.”

— Joan Didion

197. “I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.”

— Joan Didion

198. “It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.”

— Joan Didion

199. “We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.”

— Joan Didion

200. “Most death now happens in hospitals. It’s been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that’s a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common.”

— Joan Didion