The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.

— Joan Didion

Joan Didion Quotes

So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences.

— Joan Didion

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it’s less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw – if you kept the snake in you eye line, the snake wasn’t going to bite you. And that’s kind of way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

— Joan Didion

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs.

— Joan Didion

Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.

— Joan Didion

I’ve never been any place I wanted to go.

— Joan Didion

It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.

— Joan Didion

I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.

— Joan Didion

At a point during the summer it occurred to me that I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart.

— Joan Didion

January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past.

— 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?

— Joan Didion

Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.

— Joan Didion

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only.

— Joan Didion

I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.

— Joan Didion

Just an ordinary day. “And then – gone.

— Joan Didion

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

— Joan Didion

You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.

— Joan Didion

The bereaved must be urged to “sit in a sunny room,” preferably one with an open fire.

— Joan Didion

But perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that they will be missing something. Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older;.

— Joan Didion

Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

— Joan Didion

Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.

— Joan Didion
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