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Joan Didion Quotes

Total quotes: 18
“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.”
— Joan Didion, Wise Words: Didion’s Commencement Address at UC Riverside in 1975
Tagged: Graduation, Commencement Speeches, live in the moment, Seize The Day, Yolo
“As I sit on the folding metal chair I begin to fear getting up. As the finale approaches, I experience outright panic. What if my feet no longer move? What if my muscles lock?”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: anxiety in literature, what anxiety feels like, Panic, worry, Emotion, Anxiety
“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Tagged: first lines of books, San Bernardino Valley
“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 Writer on Her Work (Vol. 1)
Tagged: Why I Write, writer, Writing, Being A Writer, Thinker
“Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Children, Raising Kids
“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
— Joan Didion, Where I Came From
Tagged: Loss, Grief, Perseverence, Death
“However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it, depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Tagged: Life
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Life, Change, Loss, Heartbreak
“She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Drinking, Alcohol, Self-Medicating
“Things went wrong. She lost confidence. She became apprehensive in crowds. She was no longer entirely comfortable at the weddings of her grandchildren or even, in truth, at family dinners. She made mystifying, even hostile, judgments.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Gone Wrong, Wrong, Apprehensive
“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Emptiness, Loss, Love, Life
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album
Tagged: Stories, Writing, Life, purpose
“As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: What It Means To Grow Up, Growing Up, Childhood, Memory
“During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Blue Nights, Chill, Summer Is Gone
“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 mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
Tagged: Life
“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. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
Tagged: Past, present, self, Self-awareness
“The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Summer, Loss, Feeling in colour, Gloaming, Apprehension, Illness
“Only then did I realize that during the three weeks that had passed between taking the taxi to Lenox Hill, on the fourteenth of June, and receiving the results of the full-body PET scan, on the eighth of July, I had allowed this year’s most deeply blue nights to come and go without my notice. What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others?”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Loss, sickness, Life, Change
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