Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move…

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters…

— Joan Didion

I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are very urgent…

— Joan Didion

“I just can't see the upside in this," I heard myself say by way of explanation. Later he said that if John had been…

— Joan Didion

“By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in…

— Joan Didion

“Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems;…

— Joan Didion

“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum…

— Joan Didion

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

— Joan Didion

My mother 'gave teas' the way other mothers breathed. Her own mother 'gave teas.' All of their friends 'gave teas,' each involving butter cookies…

— Joan Didion

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

— Joan Didion

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of…

— Joan Didion

“I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.”

— Joan Didion

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

— Joan Didion

Style is character.

— Joan Didion

I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid…

— Joan Didion

To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly…

— Joan Didion