We are ourselves creations, and we in our turn are capable of creation.Joan Didion
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.Joan Didion
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.Joan Didion
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively...Joan Didion
Michigan seems like a dream to me now.Joan Didion
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Or to justify taking lives, even our own.Joan Didion
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.Joan Didion
I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it.Joan Didion
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.Joan Didion
One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.Joan Didion
The question of self-pity. I don't see how, with his (an individual's) perception of the world, that he could fail to have it.Joan Didion
Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do.Joan Didion