Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Joan Didion

253. “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

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

— Joan Didion

255. “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

256. “I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don’t read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn’t what I want to write.”

— Joan Didion

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.”

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

264. “Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere.”

— Joan Didion

265. “It’s just a deep pleasure to read something you’ve written yourself – if and when you like it.”

— Joan Didion

266. “It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.”

— Joan Didion

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “I hadn’t thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.”

— Joan Didion

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “I know what ‘nothing’ means, and I keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.”

— Joan Didion

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Joan Didion

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

282. “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

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

— Joan Didion

Featured in: Strong Quotes

284. “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

285. “I myself have always found that if I examine something, it’s less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw – if you kept the snake in you eye line, the snake wasn’t going to bite you. And that’s kind of way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.”

— Joan Didion

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Later those few minutes in the plaza in Oxnard would come back to Maria and she would replay them, change the scenario. It ended that way badly, or well, depending on what you wanted.”

— Joan Didion

292. “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

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

— Joan Didion

294. “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

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. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

300. “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