Joan Didion is an award-winning American author known for her novels, memoirs and essays. She is renowned for her lucid prose style and insightful social commentary. Her work often explores themes of psychological disorder and personal and social unrest. She has been praised for her sharp observation and ruthless scrutiny of herself and her surroundings. Reflecting on life, love, mortality, and self reflection, her quotes resonate with readers around the world. Here are 20 most popular quotes by Joan Didion:
- “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
- “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
- “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
- “Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.”
- “Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.”
- “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
- “To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
- “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
- “Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”
- “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
- “Things had better work here, because it’s the last place there is.”
- “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.”
- “Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
- “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
- “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
- “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.”
- “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
- “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth… is potentially to have everything.”
- “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
- “To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.”
These quotes showcase Didion’s thought-infused, introspective style that has brought her recognition as a sharp observer of contemporary society. Each quote carries a world of meaning beyond its face-value, serving as golden nuggets of wisdom transversed from Didion’s mind to ours. Her quotes continue to inspire and provoke thought, testifying to her lasting influence in the literary world.