Joan Didion Quotes

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth… is potentially to have everything.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

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.

We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.

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

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

I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is: a dissatisfaction with self.

What I want and what I fear are equally balanced in the formation of my character.

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

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

I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

But of course we change over time. The glory of old age is the fullness of that change.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth… is potentially to have everything.

Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.

Joan Didion Quotes part 2

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

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.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.

I don’t know what I think until I write it down.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

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

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.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

What we talk about when we talk about love is a questionable phrase.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power…

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.

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

I closed the box and put the pencil back in it, then I closed the drawer and put the pencil back in it.

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.

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

It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

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

I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is: a dissatisfaction with self.

What I want and what I fear are equally balanced in the formation of my character.

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

Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent superiority over other less famous people and stories, but because they illustrate the accidents of circumstance or character or temperament that had a hand in shaping us.