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"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything."
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"I won't compete with anybody. I love to compete with my own body. When God closes a door against me, I should not attempt to bang on it. And if God gives me a key to open a door, I should not misuse that key!"

"You are not what you think, but you are the reflection of what you think."

"When you are looking at a person, you are not seeing him; you are seeing yourself through his reflective mirror."

"There are only two things to understand in this world. First is, one's own True Self, and the other is, our faults from the past [life]. Won't these faults have to be broken?"

"He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul."
Explore more quotes by Joan Didion

"I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response."

"As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become..."

"We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as 'ordinary blessings."

"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."

"I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future."

"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?"

"Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place."

"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. And I suspect we are already there."
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