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Joan Didion Quotes

Total quotes: 29
“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.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Love, Trust
“Do not whine; Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Work Hard, Encouragement, alone time, Complaining
“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.”
— Joan Didion, Wise Words: Didion’s Commencement Address at UC Riverside in 1975
Tagged: Graduation, Commencement Speeches, live in the moment, Seize The Day, Yolo
“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.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Death, Loss, Coping With Death, Losing A Loved One, After Death, Death & Loss
“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.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
Tagged: Read In Your 20s
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
— Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
Tagged: Self-Respect, character, Life
“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Control, Life, Change, Self-Efficacy
“However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it, depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Tagged: Life
“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
— Joan Didion, Where I Came From
Tagged: Loss, Grief, Perseverence, Death
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Life, Death, Grief, Mourning, Pain, Moving On, Letting Go, Holding On
“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.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Death, Loss, Coping With Death, Losing A Loved One, After Death, Death & Loss
“She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Drinking, Alcohol, Self-Medicating
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Life, Change, Loss, Heartbreak
“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.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Loss, Pain, Holding On, Heartbreak, Change, Letting Go, Fear
“I don't know what 'fall in love' means. It's not part of my world.”
— Joan Didion, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Tagged: Love, Falling In Love, romance
“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people 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, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Tagged: dread, Grief, coping, Pain, Addiction, Belief
“The grave's a fine and private place, but none do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
Tagged: How To Think, Mortality
“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Writing, Being A Writer
“I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”
— Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays: A Novel(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Life, Success, Living
“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
Tagged: Life
“During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Blue Nights, Chill, Summer Is Gone
“we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Death, Loss, Coping With Death, Losing A Loved One, After Death, Death & Loss
“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
— Joan Didion, A Book Of Common Prayer
Tagged: Life, People, Places, Staying, Leaving, Change
“To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Self-Worth, Self-Respect, Love, Indifference, Identity, Self-improvement
“Time is the school in which we learn.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Time, Life, Learning, Moving Forward
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
Tagged: Past, present, self, Self-awareness
“Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.”
— Joan Didion, On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
Tagged: The Person You'll Become, How To Think, Self-Awakening, The Woke Book
“It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.”
— Joan Didion, On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
Tagged: Self-Respect, How To Think, Literature and Life, Vintage Words
“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, Blue Nights
Tagged: Memories, Pain, Moving Forward, Moving On, Grief, Mourning
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