599 Quotes by Joan Didion

There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.

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

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

...some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely . . . 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. –Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

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.

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.

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