We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

— Joan Didion

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not.... We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

— Joan Didion

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

— Joan Didion

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

— Joan Didion

Wembley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was “This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy.” That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one’s memory.

— Joan Didion

We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections. . . . Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

— Joan Didion

We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.

— Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

— Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

— Joan Didion

What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monies class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.

— Joan Didion