Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise.”

— Joan Didion

152. “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

153. “Misinformation about rattlesnakes is a leitmotiv of the insomniac imagination in Los Angeles.”

— Joan Didion

154. “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. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

160. “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

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

— Joan Didion

162. “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

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

— Joan Didion

164. “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

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

— Joan Didion

166. “Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already at the threatening point, and none have the right to feel hurt if they are told they can neither be of use or be received. At such a time, to some people companionship is a comfort, others shrink from their dearest friends.”

— Joan Didion

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

177. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

180. “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

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

— Joan Didion

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Joan Didion

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

189. “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

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

— Joan Didion

191. “Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”

— Joan Didion

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

196. “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

197. “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

198. “In some ways it was the conventional clandestine affair in a place like San Bernardino, a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed.”

— Joan Didion

199. “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

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