Quotessence
Home / Authors / Joan Didion
Joan Didion

Joan Didion Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllWritingThinkingPeopleIfsWantWayGriefSelfKnowsSelf RespectMagical ThinkingKindFirstsDifferentFactsMeanMourningBookChildrenDeath

Famous Joan Didion Quotes

“Actually, when John died, for the first time I thought - for the first time I realized how old I was, because I'd always thought of myself - when John was alive I saw myself through his eyes and he saw me as how old I was when we got married - and so when he died I kind of looked at myself in a different way. And this has kept on since then. The yellow corvette. When I gave up the yellow corvette, I literally gave up on it, I turned it in on a Volvo station wagon.”

WayFirstsKindDifferentEyeSawsAliveMarriedFirst TimeDiedI RealizedDifferent WaysHis EyesStationsYellowGave UpWagonsVolvo
Author:Joan Didion
Create image

“...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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image