Inspiring Joan Didion Quotes from Her Books
Joan Didion quotes are powerful expressions that beautifully and brutally capture various aspects of life, ranging from sorrow and politics to travel and culture.
She was a unique and influential voice in 20th-century American literature, contributing to essays, articles, memoirs, plays, and novels. Joan’s early years were marked by instability and frequent moving due to her father’s Army employment.
We have compiled a list of Joan Didion quotes to keep you inspired and encouraged.
Joan Didion Quotes
She hit her stride as a budding writer while in her final year at the University of California, Berkeley.
It all began when she clinched a victory in an essay contest backed by Vogue. This triumph opened the doors to a job at the magazine’s New York office in 1956.
She left behind a body of work that is still inspirational. Enjoy these Joan Didion quotes for an insight into her life.
1. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” ―
2. “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” ―
3. “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” ―
4. “We tell ourselves stories to live.” ―
5. “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.” ―
6. “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” ―
7. “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” ―
8. “To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves–there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.” ―
9. “Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.” ―
10. “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” ―
11. “Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” ―
12. “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” ―
Joan Didion Quotes about Writing
13. “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.” ―
14. To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. – Joan Didion
15. Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. – Joan Didion
16. You aren’t sure if you’re making the right decision – about anything, ever. – Joan Didion
17. We imagine things – that we wouldn’t be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it. – Joan Didion
18. It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento. – Joan Didion
19. New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. – Joan Didion
20. The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs. – Joan Didion
21. Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? – Joan Didion
22. In many ways, 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.’ It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. – Joan Didion
23. To believe in ‘the greater good’ is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. – Joan Didion
Joan Didion Quotes on Life
24. I couldn’t give away my husband’s shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes – I don’t know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do… their attachment to the ground, I don’t know – but that did have a real resonance for me. – Joan Didion
25. The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. – Joan Didion
26. Strength is one of those things you’re supposed to have. You don’t feel that you have it at the time you’re going through it. – Joan Didion
27. 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
28. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. – Joan Didion
29. It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent. – Joan Didion
30. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” – Joan Didion
31. “Do not whine…Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” – Joan Didion
32. “There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” – Joan Didion
33. “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” – Joan Didion
34. “Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.” – Joan Didion
Inspiring Quotes from Didion
35. “One man’s loose cannon is another’s freedom fight, or, in the local phrase, a man of action, or man of valor.” – Joan Didion
36. “The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.” — Joan Didion
37. “Time is the school in which we learn” ―
38. “Writers are always selling somebody out.” ―
39. “Why do you always have to be right? Why do you always have to have the last word? For once in your life just let it go.” ―
40. “I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.” ―
41. “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…” ―
43. “I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?” ― Joan Didion Quotes
44. “There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible” ―
45. “I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.” ―
46. “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” ―
47. “Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.” ―
48. “I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.” ―
49. “That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing.” ―
50. “The fear is for what is still to be lost.” – Joan Didion Quotes
51. Memories are what you no longer want to remember. – Joan Didion
Joan Didion Unique Quotes
52. Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there’s always some drive in it that is entirely personal – even if you don’t know it while you’re doing it. – Joan Didion
53. I’m not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself – there is a basic indifference toward people. – Joan Didion
54. The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own soothes all children, and many writers. – Joan Didion
55. One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they’re crazy because they realize they are thinking things that don’t make sense. – Joan Didion
56. Not much about California, on its preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected. – Joan Didion
57. I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage. – Joan Didion
58. What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. – Joan Didion
59. I don’t lead a writer’s life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. – Joan Didion
60. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, and select the most workable of the multiple choices. – Joan Didion
61. I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it was the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. – Joan Didion
Best Quotes from Joan Didion
62. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that. – Joan Didion
63. You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line. – Joan Didion
64. I have a theatrical temperament. I’m not interested in the middle road – maybe because everyone’s on it. Rationality and reasonableness bewilder me. – Joan Didion
65. When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends. – Joan Didion
66. The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. – Joan Didion
67. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. – Joan Didion
68. Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. – Joan Didion
69. Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. – Joan Didion
70. 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
71. “I, myself, have always found that if I examine something, it’s less scary.” — Joan Didion,
72. “The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. The fear is for what is still to be lost.” — Joan Didion
Encouraging Quotes from Joan
73. “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,
74. I do have a strong sense of order in the universe. – Joan Didion
75. I recognize a lot of the things I’m going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical. – Joan Didion
76. The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, and what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black. – Joan Didion
77. My fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular. – Joan Didion
78. Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when the choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before? – Joan Didion
79. I was raised an Episcopalian. And I did not and I don’t believe that anyone is looking out for me. – Joan Didion
80. The truth is, it’s easier for me to write than talk… to express the state I’m in at any time. – Joan Didion
Joan Didion is an excellent illustration of someone who used their situation to their advantage. Never consider your knowledge and expertise to be worthless.
Don’t undervalue yourself or what you are, and you might be able to use your experiences to launch a successful career like Joan Didion.
Don’t forget to take a look at our similar collection of quotes as you share with others to get inspired.
