Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “When my mother was near death at age ninety she told me that she was ready to die but could not. “You and Jim need me,” she said. My brother and I were by then in our sixties.”

— Joan Didion

352. “She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.”

— Joan Didion

353. “I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.”

— Joan Didion

354. “They lost concentration. “After a year I could read headlines,” I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before.”

— Joan Didion

355. “Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.”

— Joan Didion

356. “The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.”

— Joan Didion

357. “The second kind of grief was “complicated grief,” which was also known in the literature as “pathological bereavement” and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another.”

— Joan Didion

358. “It came to her that in the scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered with distant interest just how long the scene would play.”

— Joan Didion

359. “She didn’t know the songs,” I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience.”

— Joan Didion

360. “As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.”

— Joan Didion

361. “As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only.”

— Joan Didion

362. “When I try to reconstruct those weeks at UCLA I recognize the mudginess in my own memory. There are parts of days that seem very clear and parts of days that do not.”

— Joan Didion

363. “In fact I did not need to look, nor could I avoid them by not looking: I knew them by heart.”

— Joan Didion

364. “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there. I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be Where no storms come.”

— Joan Didion

365. “Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”

— Joan Didion

366. “Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?”

— Joan Didion

367. “Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had “changed.” Only recently have I come to see them as quite the opposite, evidence of how California had “not changed,” and to understand “change” itself as one of the culture’s most enduring misunderstandings about itself.”

— Joan Didion

368. “This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.”

— Joan Didion

369. “I superstiti si voltano indietro e scorgono presagi, messaggi di cui non si sono accorti.”

— Joan Didion

370. “In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. Women died in childbirth. Children died of fevers. Cancer was untreatable. At the time she undertook her book of etiquette, there would have been few American households untouched by the influenza pandemic of 1918. Death was up close, at home.”

— Joan Didion

371. “I’ve never been any place I wanted to go.”

— Joan Didion

372. “Superstition prevails, fear that the fragile unfinished something will shatter, vanish, revert to the nothing from which it was made.”

— Joan Didion

373. “What continued to dominate the rhetoric of the 1988 campaign, however, was not this awareness of a new and different world but nostalgia for an old one, and coded assurance that any evidence of ambiguity or change, of what George Bush called the “deterioration of values,” would be summarily dealt with by increased social control.”

— Joan Didion

374. “It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.”

— Joan Didion

375. “The bereaved must be urged to “sit in a sunny room,” preferably one with an open fire.”

— Joan Didion

376. “I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.”

— Joan Didion

377. “The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”

— Joan Didion

378. “Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying. It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight. He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.”

— Joan Didion

379. “In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless. In.”

— Joan Didion

380. “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

— Joan Didion

381. “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. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

— Joan Didion

382. “If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?”

— Joan Didion

383. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

— Joan Didion

384. “The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.”

— Joan Didion

385. “She wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view.”

— Joan Didion

386. “I began to make notes. I began to write down everything I saw and heard and remembered and imagined. I began to write, or so I thought, another story.”

— Joan Didion

387. “Why did I keep stressing what was and was not normal, when nothing about it was?”

— Joan Didion

388. “Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems; all of these are fundamentally influenced by brain function and neurotransmitters.”

— Joan Didion