Joan Didion

Author

1934-12-05 – 2021-12-23

Quotes by Joan Didion

• 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. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.

  Read quote

• Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.

  Read quote

• When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

  Read quote

• We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as ordinary blessings.

  Read quote

• I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

  Read quote

• [P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.

  Read quote

• Of course the activists— not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic— had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, Ave could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words— words are for —typeheads,— Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips— their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from —a broken home.— They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

  Read quote

• The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.

  Read quote

• The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

  Read quote

• We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

  Read quote

• What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.

  Read quote

• That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (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), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

  Read quote

• Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was "This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy." That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory.

  Read quote

• Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

  Read quote

• Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

  Read quote