Quotes by Joan Didion

“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.”

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

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the minds door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

“To have that sense of ones 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.”

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget”

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

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.”

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

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

I write entirely to find out what Im thinking, what Im looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

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. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

Another thing I need to do, when Im near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesnt leave you when youre asleep right next to it.

Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was “This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy.” That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one’s memory.

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

What these men represented was not The West but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.