We tell ourselves stories in order to live.Joan Didion
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.Joan Didion
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.Joan Didion
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.Joan Didion
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.Joan Didion
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.Joan Didion
All I mean is that I was very young in those days, and that the only way I could deal with life was to go on postponing it.Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.Joan Didion
I suppose we all have our recollections of what we once told ourselves constituted heroism.Joan Didion
In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.Joan Didion