Joan Didion Quotes

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

"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."

"Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?"

"You have to pick the places you don't walk away from."

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

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

"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"

"Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power."

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

"Call me the author."

"The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream."

"Writers are always selling somebody out."

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

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

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

"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."

"Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins."

"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."

"A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye."

"I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it"