Joan Didion

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. ↗

— Joan Didion

#play

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

— Joan Didion

#life #responsibility #self-respect #life

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. ↗

— Joan Didion

#storytelling #storytelling

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. ↗

— Joan Didion

#claims #forever #hardest #his #image

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. ↗

— Joan Didion

#innocence #self-acceptance #respect

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. ↗

— Joan Didion

#imagine #imagining #natural #writer #imagination

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know. ↗

— Joan Didion

#imagination

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive. ↗

— Joan Didion

#imagine #messages #survival #survive #imagination

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. ↗

— Joan Didion

#stories #experience

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

— Joan Didion

#could #dreaming #find #i #only