599 Quotes by Joan Didion

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.

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

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?

their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need.