Joan Didion

"I don’t know what I think until I write it down."

- Joan Didion

"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."

- Joan Didion

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

- Joan Didion

"I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."

- Joan Didion

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

- Joan Didion

"Grief when it comes, it is nothing like we expect it to be."

- Joan Didion

"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."

- Joan Didion

"It unfolds as you write it. That’s something I never believed before I wrote a book, but it does."

- Joan Didion

"To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth… is potentially to have everything."

- Joan Didion

"I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots."

- Joan Didion

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

- Joan Didion

"Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."

- Joan Didion

"“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”"

- Joan Didion

"Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts."

- Joan Didion

"Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be."

- Joan Didion