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Joan Didion

Joan Didion Quotes

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Famous Joan Didion Quotes

“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can "drive" on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”

PeopleThinkingWayMindKindSeemsLosingCleanMereDrivingSurrenderIntenseRhythmConcentrationLos AngelesSecularCommunionParticipationVocationLanesRaptureResistingParticipatingFreewaysDriving On
Author:Joan Didion
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“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
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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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“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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“When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.”

WayWritingChildrenWishSubjectsDependsPagesOur ChildrenAcquaintanceCasualOpaque
Author:Joan Didion
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“We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.”

MenWayActionSocialFateGenerationsPeriodsOptimismSilentOfficialsJust OneMeaninglessDreadRepressionEscapingExhilarationSocial Action
Author:Joan Didion
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