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.

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

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.

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.

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.