Joan Didion

It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

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.

Writers are always selling someone out.

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

The White Album (1979)

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?

Run River (1963)

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

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.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth... is potentially to have everything...

California: The west coast of Iowa.

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

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968) ‘On Morality’

Joan Didion

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