Top 380 Joan Didion Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded by happiness.”

— Joan Didion

353. “I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.”

— Joan Didion

354. “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

355. “One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor’s office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing.”

— Joan Didion

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Joan Didion

359. “There were the youngest children, small girls with leis, barefoot. There were watercress sandwiches, champagne, lemonade, peach-colored napkins to match the sorbet that came with the cake, peacocks on the lawn. She kicked off the expensive shoes and unpinned the veil. ‘Wasn’t that just about perfect,’ she said when she called that evening.”

— Joan Didion

360. “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

361. “There was a way to know if you had made headway. You knew you had made headway, when a doctor to whom you had made one or another suggestions, presented, a day later, the plan as his own.”

— Joan Didion

362. “This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.”

— Joan Didion

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

367. “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

368. “Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?”

— Joan Didion

369. “By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

— Joan Didion

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

379. “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

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

— Joan Didion

381. “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

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

— Joan Didion

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Joan Didion

387. “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

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

— Joan Didion