Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with — or maybe overly focused on — the idea that they can’t display self-pity, they have to be strong. Actually there are a lot of reasons why you are going to feel sorry for yourself, but that’s your first concern.

Joan Didion

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

Joan Didion

respect self-esteem life

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Joan Didion

nodding attractive people

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

Joan Didion

pain scary eye

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan Didion

writing mean thinking

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Joan Didion

remember memories thinking

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

Joan Didion

nodding never-forget memories

Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.

Joan Didion

focus stories writing

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

Joan Didion

locked-doors stills lost

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

stories writing order

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

Joan Didion

work-harder more-time complaining

We all survive more than we think we can.

Joan Didion

thinking

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

multiple-choice suicide order

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

Joan Didion

respect self lying

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

Joan Didion

missing grieving world

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Joan Didion

flow gone two

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

Joan Didion

music power english-grammar

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

doors night thinking

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

Joan Didion

blue night book

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

Joan Didion

three twenties blessing

we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

Joan Didion

bereavement loss inspirational