Joan Didion Quotes

On the narrative you keep repeating to make sense of a hard choice:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

On the impulse to sabotage something good right before it works out:

Vertigo is a symptom, not of fear of falling but of a tendency to jump.

On the ordinary evening that became the worst day of your life:

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

On being surprised by how strange grief actually feels:

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

Deciding whether to return to normal life before you're actually ready:

We forget that mourning has its own time.

Weighing what a long marriage actually is once you look past the daily routine:

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

Explaining to others why grief keeps interrupting a life that looks fine on the surface:

Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apparent seizures that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

On rebuilding self respect after a public failure:

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

On owning a mistake instead of explaining it away:

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

On why leaving your hometown never fully leaves you:

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 own image.

On holding a boundary even when it costs you the relationship:

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve, they display what was once called character.

On the moment you stopped believing your own excuses:

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Deciding whether to reconnect with an old version of yourself you've outgrown:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.

Deciding whether to publish something true that will cost someone else:

That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

On why you keep a journal through a confusing season:

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.

Noticing how quickly you stopped believing things could still change for you:

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

Continuing to function while privately admitting nothing makes sense right now:

I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.