Joan Didion

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

“Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”

“The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago...”

“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.”

“Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?”

“Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”

“Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.”

“Writers are always selling somebody out.”

“Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.”

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

“Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?”

“One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“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.”

“Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”

“New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”