I read so ravenously that I would read through whole categories. I was crazy about reading biographies. [...] I think biographies are… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will,… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.” — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for "typeheads," Chester Anderson… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.” — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Becoming a parent is actually terrifying. A lot of people have that feeling about their dogs. And if you're the kind of… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what… — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people. — Joan Didion Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
