Top Joan Didion Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Joan Didion Biography

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American journalist and writer of novels, screenplays, and autobiographical works. Didion is best known for her literary journalism and memoirs. In her novels and essays, Didion explores the disintegration of American morals and cultural chaos; the overriding theme of her work is individual and social fragmentation.

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Joan Didion Quotes

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

Thinking, Want, Way, Work, Writing

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

Distract, Grieving, Impulse, Person, Persons

When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.

Book, Room, Rooms, Sleep

I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

Deranged, Kind, Natural, Transition, Transitions

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

Absolute, America, Mobility, Point, Privacy, Secret

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

Already, Couple, Lost, People, Used

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

Ability, Depends, Mastery, Self, Think, Thinking

. . . quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.

Colloquial, New York, Remember, Simply, Spring, Twilight

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

Blessed, Limited, Mind, Reason, Writing

Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

Marriage, Memories, Memory, Time

I lead a very conventional life.

Conventional, Conventional Life, Lead, Life

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.

Alive, Dead, Live, Order, Relinquish, Trying

I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the non-plused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

Approval, Beta, Children, Hands, Men, Phi

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

Expect, Grief, Like, Nothing

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Live, Order, Stories, Tell, Writing

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

Cameras, Definitely, Inflexibly, Structure, Writing

We all survive more than we think we can.

Survive, Think, Thinking

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something. . . but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.

Deceiving, Imperative, Join, Moral, Thinking, Want Something

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Flow, Gone, Options, Stuck, Two

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

Last Words, Lasts, Let, Let It Go, Life, Right

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