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Joan Didion

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Famous Joan Didion Quotes

“If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that admiration, if they're not used to being written about, if they're civilians, [...] they're not used to seeing themselves through other people's eyes. So you will always see them from a slightly different angle than they see themselves, and they feel a little betrayed by that.”

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Author:Joan Didion
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“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.”

ShouldYearsMindMadeTwoEndsSelfMatterRecordsParticularPagesLettersShould HaveSeasonsOneselfLikesClarityInnocenceDrySelf RespectDelusionRecallsAshesEmbarrassingFlavorNotebookMisplaced
Book:We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction
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“I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the non-plused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.”

MenChildrenSelfHandsLightCertainTurnsLostVirtueHairKeysHonorGreenCleanConvictionScalesCertaintyVampireMannersPleasantSelf RespectGood ManTouchingApprovalPassiveProvenCompetenceDoubtfulApprehensionGood MannersStanfordTotemsBetaAmulets
Author:Joan Didion
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“...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.”

WayFirstsMeanPersonsRememberCitiesStreetsNew YorkWalkingLateEatingSpringWestCornersTwilightSixtyAvenuesFirst PersonPeachesMiragesMean LoveLexington
Book:We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction
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“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.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsMindWellsUsedNightTurnsTermCompanyDoorsDemandSurpriseUsed To BeAttractiveBetrayedYour PastDesertedAmendsNoddingBethlehemMagical ThinkingBad NightMaking Amends
Author:Joan Didion
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“But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.”

MenHumansPlayFactsDogWindPromiseIllusionEmptyBallsCleanWeatherRuinsVanityOld ManOrgansDukesWhiningEmpty Places
Book:Slouching towards Bethlehem
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“prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.”

IfsWantShouldFirstsLittlesMatterFactsCareUnderstandingForgetWeekHotTeaDistressMatter Of FactDisruptionContainersPhysiologicalGingerArrestingChinatownHot Tea
Author:Joan Didion
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“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.”

IfsLooksIdeasStoriesOrderChoicesSocialLinesMoralFiveLessonsMurderSuicideNarrativeMultipleSermonsShiftingSelectFreezeImpositionMultiple ChoiceMoral Lessons
Author:Joan Didion
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“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

WritingYearsChildrenDifferentFeltLossSleepAcceptingDoubtFiveBirthDaughterLonelyWake UpBlessedFive YearsMy DaughterAnxiousCompelledDelightedNotebookGoing To SleepKeepersFive Year OldsUnafraidMalcontent
Book:Slouching towards Bethlehem
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“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”

PeopleKindSelfSometimesCharacterLife IsCertainLosesQualityResponsibilityAcceptingMoralVirtueSourceSpringAbstractSelf RespectWillingnessNervesDisplayExhibitsApprovedToughness
Author:Joan Didion
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“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.”

WayFirstsLittlesDoeSelfFilmOpportunityLevelsJudgmentCriticismObviousOccupationLecturesFees
Book:We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction
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“I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.”

NeedsArtSaidDoneStoriesLightSkyDaughterEmptySevenCloudsRanMy DaughterChicagoAfternoonRecallsStairsAugustGeorgiaInstituteLandingDominatingAbove The CloudsGeorgia O Keeffe
Book:The White Album
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“As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.”

MenWantHeartKindStillsFallGrowsLinesKnownForeverGrowing UpVirtueTakenHappenedMy HeartRainRiversWesternArtificialWayneHeroinesBe The Kind Of Woman
Author:Joan Didion
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