Joan Didion Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old Joan Didion quotes, Joan Didion sayings, and Joan Didion proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.'

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self Joan Didion
Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs. Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. Joan Didion
There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could. Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. Joan Didion
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. Joan Didion
Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification. Joan Didion
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye. Joan Didion
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young. Joan Didion
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. Joan Didion
Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. Joan Didion
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing. Joan Didion
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. Joan Didion
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service. Joan Didion
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers. Joan Didion
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. Joan Didion
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. Joan Didion
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service. Joan Didion
Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored. Joan Didion
Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Joan Didion
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. Joan Didion
I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Joan Didion
She had to have a telephone. There was no one to whom she wanted to talk but she had to have a telephone. Joan Didion
And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I. Joan Didion
California is a place where...the mind is troubled by some...suspicion that things had better work here, because here,beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent Joan Didion
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. Joan Didion
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self. Joan Didion