Thought.is

24 Joan Didion Quotes That Will Temporarily Shoulder The Weight Of Your Grief

For the days when it's weighing too heavily.
Heidi Priebe
December 1, 2016
“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. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.”
— Joan Didion, Wise Words: Didion’s Commencement Address at UC Riverside in 1975
Tagged: Graduation, Commencement Speeches, live in the moment, Seize The Day, Yolo
“However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it, depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Tagged: Life
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
Tagged: Read In Your 20s
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Death, Loss, Coping With Death, Losing A Loved One, After Death, Death & Loss
“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Death, Loss, Coping With Death, Losing A Loved One, After Death, Death & Loss
“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Death, Loss, Coping With Death, Losing A Loved One, After Death, Death & Loss
“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Grief, Loss, Love, Missing Someone, Pain
“I think 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 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Past Selves, Identity, Change, Personal Growth, Personal Development, Self-Love
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
— Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
Tagged: Self-Respect, character, Life
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Life, Living, Stories, Narratives
“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
— Joan Didion, A Book Of Common Prayer
Tagged: Life, People, Places, Staying, Leaving, Change
“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.”
— Michiko Kakutani, Joan Didion: Staking Out California
Tagged: Place, Belonging, Change, Identity, Staying, Leaving, Home, Traveling
“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
— Joan Didion, Where I Was From
Tagged: Loss, Pain, Grief, Moving On, Acceptance
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Change, Life, Moving On, Grief
“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Memory, Change, Life, Perception
“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Control, Life, Change, Self-Efficacy
“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Tagged: dread, Grief, coping, Pain, Addiction, Belief
“You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Memories, Pain, Moving Forward, Moving On, Grief, Mourning
“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.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Self-Worth, Self-Respect, Love, Indifference, Identity, Self-improvement
“I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Tagged: Loss, Pain, Holding On, Heartbreak, Change, Letting Go, Fear
“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Writing, Being A Writer
“There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.”
— Joan Didion, Paris Review
Tagged: Moving On, Moving Forward, Change, Stagnancy, Self-Direction
“I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”
— Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays: A Novel(FSG Classics)
Tagged: Life, Success, Living
“Time is the school in which we learn.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Time, Life, Learning, Moving Forward