Quotes from Joan Didion

This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why. She was never an idealist, and this pleased no one. She was tainted by survival. She came back from the other side with a story no one wanted to hear, a dispiriting account of a situation in which delusion and incompetence were pitted against delusion and incompetence of another kind, and in the febrile rhythms of San Francisco in the midseventies it seemed a story devoid of high notes.

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

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. 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.

Everyone was in scrubs. I noticed one man who was not in scrubs. "Is this the wife," he said to the driver. Then he looked at me. "I'm your social worker." And I guess that was when I knew. That's something else to remember. If they give you a social worker, you're in trouble.

People who respect themselves are welling to accept the risk…they are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

both schoolteachers and both dedicated to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, whose members observe the Sabbath on Saturday, believe in an apocalyptic Second Coming, have a strong missionary tendency, and, if they are strict, do not smoke, drink, eat meat, use makeup, or wear jewelry, including wedding rings.

Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship's a little truer That's where the West begins.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent

I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty or twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke.

Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I.

I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.

the favored victim in the tabloid headline . . . was young, white, middle class and 'attractive'.

I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.

I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $ 1,000 a month. "Someday you will," she said lazily. "Someday it all comes." There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in someday, but later I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear when I heard the checkout clerk explaining to the man ahead of me why she was finally divorcing her husband.

People who respect themselves...are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds. That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

In other words she was wrenched, even as she hung between death and life and later between insentience and sentience, into New York's ideal sister, daughter, Bacharach bride: a young woman of conventional middle-class privilege and promise whose situation was such that many people tended to overlook the fact that the state's case against the accused was not invulnerable.

when she drank she did not dream.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

Call me the author.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.