Joan Didion

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.

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

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.

I am not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I am 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.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

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.

I want to learn from you. I want to be like you, strong and graceful and full of friendliness.

One 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 to anyone before.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.

I could not count upon the company of any city where I had not spent one long evening talking to at least one man of my own age who understood the game of baseball.