Joan Didion

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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.

Joan Didion

On Keeping a Notebook

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Didion, Joan. "On Keeping a Notebook." Holiday, 1966.

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

The White Album

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Didion, Joan. "The White Album." The White Album. Simon & Schuster, 1979.

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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Didion

Vogue

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Didion, Joan. "Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power." Vogue, 1 Aug. 1961.

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Didion, Joan. "On Self-Respect." Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

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

Joan Didion

Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power

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Original Citation

Didion, Joan. "Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power." Vogue, 1 Aug. 1961.

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Current Citation

Didion, Joan. "On Self-Respect." Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.

Joan Didion

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Original Citation

Didion, Joan. "Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power." Vogue, 1 Aug. 1961.

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Current Citation

Didion, Joan. "On Self-Respect." Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?

Joan Didion

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Didion, Joan. Run, River. Ivan Obolensky, Inc., 1963.

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

Joan Didion

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Didion, Joan. Blue Nights. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, ch. 2.

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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.

Joan Didion

The White Album

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Didion, Joan. "In the Islands." The White Album. Simon & Schuster, 1979.

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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Joan Didion

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Original Citation

Didion, Joan. "The Insidious Ethic of Conscience." The American Scholar, 1965.

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Current Citation

Didion, Joan. "On Morality." Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

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We never reach a point at which our lives lie before us as a clearly marked open road, never have and never should expect a map to the years ahead, never do close those circles that seem, at thirteen and fourteen and nineteen, so urgently in need of closing.

Joan Didion

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Original Citation

Didion, Joan. "Pacific Distances." After Henry. Simon & Schuster, 1992.

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Current Citation

Didion, Joan. "Pacific Distances." Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s, edited by David L. Ulin. Library of America, 2021.

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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.

Joan Didion

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Didion, Joan. "The White Album." The White Album. Simon & Schuster, 1979.

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We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking

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Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, ch. 17.

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