Joan Didion Quotes

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

We are the stories we tell ourselves

What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you just to live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm telling you to live in it. Try and get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

We write to discover what we think.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.

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.

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.

We all survive more than we think we can.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Anything worth having has its price.

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

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.

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.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

Time is the school in which we learn.