Joan Didion Quotes

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.

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.

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

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child’s primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living.