Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Joan Didion

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Joan Didion

206. “Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.”

— Joan Didion

207. “The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.”

— Joan Didion

208. “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

209. “I don’t write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.”

— Joan Didion

210. “I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can’t read it in one sitting, you’re going to lose the rhythm of it. You’re going to lose the shape of it.”

— Joan Didion

211. “When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.”

— Joan Didion

212. “It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.”

— Joan Didion

213. “Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.”

— Joan Didion

214. “Hand that on parting squeezes your shoulder, salutes the small of your back.”

— Joan Didion

215. “I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.”

— Joan Didion

216. “It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano’s situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.”

— Joan Didion

217. “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

218. “I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.”

— Joan Didion

219. “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

220. “In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. 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

221. “Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But its really God – playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven – shattering stained glass – playing a gigantic organ – thundering on the keys – perfect harmony – perfect joy.”

— Joan Didion

222. “I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn’t pay much attention, behaved – I suppose – deviously. I mean I didn’t actually let too many people know what I was doing.”

— Joan Didion

223. “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

224. “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.”

— Joan Didion

225. “Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”

— Joan Didion

226. “The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.”

— Joan Didion

227. “Persons under the shock of genuine affliction are not only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, sleepless.”

— Joan Didion

228. “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.”

— Joan Didion

229. “I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.”

— Joan Didion

230. “Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.”

— Joan Didion

231. “They who came to California were not the self-satisfied, happy and content people, but the adventurous, the restless, and the daring. They were different even from those who settled in other western states. They didn’t come west for homes and security, but for adventure and money. They pushed in over the mountains and founded the biggest cities in the west.”

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

233. “Mourning has its place but also its limits.”

— Joan Didion

234. “These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.”

— Joan Didion

235. “Discussion of how California has ‘changed,’ then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.”

— Joan Didion

236. “If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die?”

— Joan Didion

237. “I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.”

— Joan Didion

238. “Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.”

— Joan Didion

239. “You couldn’t pay for her hats,′ her father, a ship’s captain, had told her suitors by way of discouragement, and perhaps they had all been discouraged but my grandfather, an innocent from the Georgetown Divide who read books.”

— Joan Didion

240. “Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.”

— Joan Didion

241. “When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.”

— Joan Didion

242. “Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

— Joan Didion

243. “Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.”

— Joan Didion

244. “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

245. “Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.”

— Joan Didion

246. “I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.”

— Joan Didion

247. “You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you’re writing, and if it doesn’t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can’t imagine that moment when it suddenly will.”

— Joan Didion

248. “I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.”

— Joan Didion

249. “Had he not warned me when I forgot my own notebook that the ability to make a note when something came to mind was the difference between being able to write and not being able to write?”

— Joan Didion

250. “You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”

— Joan Didion