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Best Didion Quotes & Sayings

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Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

You couldn't pay for her hats,' her father, a ship's captain, had told her suitors by way of discouragement, and perhaps they had all been discouraged but my grandfather, an innocent from the Georgetown Divide who read books. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

To make an omelette, you need not only those broken eggs but someone 'oppressed' to beat them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I've done that day. I can't do it late in the afternoon because I'm too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

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

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginning of self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Did mothers always try to press unto their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed. Did I? — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else.
I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

But of course I did not mention dread to Michael Laski, whose particular opiate is History. I did suggest "depression," did venture that it might have been "depressing" for him to see only a dozen or so faces at his last May Day demonstration, but he told me that depression was an impediment to the revolutionary process, a disease afflicting only those who do not have ideology to sustain them. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Janet Fitch

This involves more than I can discuss here, but do it. Read the writers of great prose dialogue-people like Robert Stone and Joan Didion. Compression, saying as little as possible, making everything carry much more than is actually said. Conflict. Dialogue as part of an ongoing world, not just voices in a dark room. Never say the obvious. Skip the meet and greet. — Janet Fitch

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before? — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Memories are what you no longer want to remember. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

The past could be jettisoned ... but seeds got carried. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. "I feel it's insane," he says, and his voice drops. "This chick tells me there's no meaning to life but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it's going to happen." He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. "Here you know it's not going to."
I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.
"I don't know," he says. "Something. Anything. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things. — Joan Didion

Best Didion Quotes By Joan Didion

I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me. — Joan Didion