I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. - Joan Didion
The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. - Joan Didion
[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. - Joan Didion
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. - Joan Didion
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come. - Joan Didion
Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it. - Joan Didion
I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world. - Joan Didion
Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. - Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. - Joan Didion
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. - Joan Didion
She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card. - Joan Didion
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. - Joan Didion
California: The west coast of Iowa. - Joan Didion
Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs. - Joan Didion
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth... is potentially to have everything... - Joan Didion
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? - Joan Didion
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel - Joan Didion