I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

— Joan Didion

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. 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. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…

— Joan Didion

It is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself.

— Joan Didion

It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.

— Joan Didion

It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?

— Joan Didion

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

— 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.

— Joan Didion

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.

— Joan Didion

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

— Joan Didion

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

— Joan Didion