Best Quotes by Joan Didion (Top 10)

  1. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
  2. 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.
  3. The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
  4. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
  5. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
  6. We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
  7. You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.
  8. To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
  9. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
  10. 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.

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