Joan Didion Quotes - BrainyQuote

American - Author Born: December 5, 1934

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

Pool Swimming Never Always

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Life You Dinner Down

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

Self-Respect Worth Price Anything

Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.

Sky Doing Late Afternoon

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Life Responsibility Self-Respect Own

You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever.

You Decision Right Right Decision

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Thought Never Forget Forget Never

Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

Great Service Ideas Always

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Respect Power Great Self-Respect

A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

Water Pool Eye Useful

Top 10
Joan Didion
Quotes

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.

You Mind Long Words

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

People Mind Night Think

When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.

Mother Yellow Child Go

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

Life Children Own Than

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

You Down Research Matter

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

Life Life Changes Changes Ordinary

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

Power Know Play Piano

I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.

Clouds Flying Amazing Book

The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.

Me Black Rose Strong

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

Life Believe Illusion Live

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

Place Own Image Forever

I am always writing to myself.

Myself I Am Always Writing

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

Me People Never Talk

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.

Fear Looking Thinking See

I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.

Good People Parents Think

When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.

Friends Know Late Spring

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