Quotes from Joan Didion

Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look "right" to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the name of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.

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. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

When my father was told that I had been rejected from Stanford, he shrugged and offered me a drink.

This is in fact the kind of story we expect to hear about our elected officials. We not only expect them to use other nations as changeable scrims in the theater of domestic politics but encourage them to do so.

You can get high on a mantra, he says, but I'm holy on acid.

She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled.

That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than when I am home. Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one's past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room.

History is context.

I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own.

I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error)

because in at least one respect California—the California we are talking about—resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone's memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else's memory, stories handed down on the family network.

The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered.

Sacramento was the least typical of the Valley towns, and it is—but only because it is bigger and more diverse, only because it has had the rivers and the legislature; its true character remains the Valley character, its virtues the Valley virtues, its sadness the Valley sadness.

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go tot he literature. Information was control.

August comes on not like a month but like an affliction.

Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane.

Tell me what matters,' BZ said. 'Nothing,' Maria said.

In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.

Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter

At Beth Israel there had been Acinetobacter baumannii, which was resistant to vancomycin. That's how you know it's a hospital infection, I recall being told by a doctor I asked at Columbia Presbyterian. If it's resistant to vanc it's hospital. Because vanc only gets used in hospital settings.

It is hard to remember what we came to remember.