Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.”

— Joan Didion

252. “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

253. “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

254. “You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change.”

— Joan Didion

255. “New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich.”

— Joan Didion

256. “What you’re normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.”

— Joan Didion

257. “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

258. “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

259. “Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.”

— Joan Didion

260. “Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.”

— Joan Didion

261. “You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.”

— Joan Didion

262. “I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.”

— Joan Didion

263. “Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.”

— Joan Didion

264. “In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect. The effect is lively and avaricious and intensely self-absorbed, a tone not uncommon in colonial cities, and the principal reason I find such cities invigorating.”

— Joan Didion

265. “Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After.”

— Joan Didion

266. “What seemed novel about the use of focus groups in the 1992 campaign was the increasingly narrow part of the population to which either party was interested in listening, and the extent to which this extreme selectivity had transformed the governing of the country, for most of its citizens, into a series of signals meant for someone else.”

— Joan Didion

267. “She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads, never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything ‘sad’.”

— Joan Didion

268. “Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.”

— Joan Didion

269. “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

270. “I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.”

— Joan Didion

271. “About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.”

— Joan Didion

272. “When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.”

— Joan Didion

273. “I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.”

— Joan Didion

274. “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

275. “I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.”

— Joan Didion

276. “I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.”

— Joan Didion

277. “As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to 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

278. “Burroughs’s voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.”

— Joan Didion

279. “Before I’d written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers – when you’ve got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people’s ability to do that.”

— Joan Didion

280. “How could this have happened when everything was normal?”

— Joan Didion

281. “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

282. “Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.”

— Joan Didion

283. “At a point during the summer it occurred to me that I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart.”

— Joan Didion

284. “My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.”

— Joan Didion

285. “I don’t lead a writer’s life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.”

— Joan Didion

286. “Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It’s a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don’t do it would ever believe.”

— Joan Didion

287. “To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.”

— Joan Didion

288. “It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.”

— Joan Didion

289. “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

290. “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

291. “So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences.”

— Joan Didion

292. “In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.”

— Joan Didion

293. “Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.”

— Joan Didion

294. “Death,” he wrote, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.”

— Joan Didion

295. “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

296. “That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim “the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude,” and it was characteristic of Charlotte that whenever the phrase “realistic but optimistic” appeared in a school communique she read it as “realistic and optimistic.”

— Joan Didion

297. “The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state.”

— Joan Didion

298. “More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child’s primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living.”

— Joan Didion

299. “The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people,” she said. “The hardest is with one.”

— Joan Didion

300. “You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That’s really the most complicated part.”

— Joan Didion