Joan Didion Quotes

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”

“I don't know what I think until I write it down.”

“I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

“I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”

“Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.”

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?”

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.”

“Time is the school in which we learn”

“Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”

“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.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”

“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.”

“[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”

“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”

“Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.”

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”

“Writers are always selling somebody out.”

“It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.”

“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”

“We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

“I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.”

“I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs… The way I write is who I am, or have become…”

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

“The past could be jettisoned… but seeds got carried.”

“One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.”

“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.”

“When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.”

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.”