Quotes from Joan Didion

there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.

They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as "anecdotal".

Who is the director of dreams, would he care? Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

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...Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about "the democratic process", or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals

I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes.

Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

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.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means…. What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities.

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…. What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

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

Dear Joan, the letter begins, although the writer did not know me at all.

Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went but where is the school-girl who used to be me, and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that.

Because he made her so happy, she said, and for that moment believed it.

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 image

Kara Dukakis, one of the candidate's daughters, had at that moment emerged from the 737. "You'd have a beer with him?

I did that on purpose,' Lucille Miller told Erwin Sprengle later, 'to save myself from letting my heart do something crazy.

Almost everybody I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future. I never ask why.