Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had “changed.” Only recently have I come to see them as quite the opposite, evidence of how California had “not changed,” and to understand “change” itself as one of the culture’s most enduring misunderstandings about itself.

— Joan Didion

Joan Didion Quotes

In fact I did not need to look, nor could I avoid them by not looking: I knew them by heart.

— Joan Didion

Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?

— Joan Didion

She wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view.

— Joan Didion

She didn’t know the songs,” I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience.

— Joan Didion

I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.

— Joan Didion

When I try to reconstruct those weeks at UCLA I recognize the mudginess in my own memory. There are parts of days that seem very clear and parts of days that do not.

— Joan Didion

Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

— Joan Didion

Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

— Joan Didion

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.

— Joan Didion

What would I give to be able to discuss anything at all with John? What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy? What would that small thing be? If I had said it in time would it have worked?

— Joan Didion

I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back.

— Joan Didion

Nei momenti difficili, mi era stato insegnato fin dall’infanzia, leggi, impara, datti da fare, rivolgiti alla letteratura. Essere informati significava non perdere il controllo.

— Joan Didion

I superstiti si voltano indietro e scorgono presagi, messaggi di cui non si sono accorti.

— Joan Didion

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded by happiness.

— Joan Didion

This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.

— Joan Didion

One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor’s office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing.

— Joan Didion

The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.

— Joan Didion

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?

— Joan Didion

I began to make notes. I began to write down everything I saw and heard and remembered and imagined. I began to write, or so I thought, another story.

— Joan Didion

What continued to dominate the rhetoric of the 1988 campaign, however, was not this awareness of a new and different world but nostalgia for an old one, and coded assurance that any evidence of ambiguity or change, of what George Bush called the “deterioration of values,” would be summarily dealt with by increased social control.

— Joan Didion
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