Joan Didion Quotes & Quotations

Joan Didion Quotes

» Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

» We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

» There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.

» Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

» 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. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

» When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

» 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 4am 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.

» 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.

» Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

» The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Who Said It?

Who Said: "Parting is such sweet sorrow." Click To See

Daily Famous Quote

Who Said: "A teacher's purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image." Subscribe

Noyemi Famous Quotes

Famous Quotes & Quotations by Famous and Not-So-Famous People