Joan Didion

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

— 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…

— Joan Didion

Style is character.

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— 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…

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— 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…

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

“For everything there is a season. I'd miss having the seasons, people from New York like to say by way of indicating…

— Joan Didion

“I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.”

— Joan Didion

I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels…

— Joan Didion

Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with — or maybe overly focused on — the idea that…

— Joan Didion

“Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max…

— Joan Didion

There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.

— Joan Didion

Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl…

— Joan Didion

“I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to…

— Joan Didion

“I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for…

— Joan Didion

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England…

— Joan Didion