If you’re looking for Joan Didion quotes about self, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people. And in this article we share a list of the 9 most interesting quotes about self by Joan Didion. Let’s get inspired!
Joan Didion quotes about self
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
— Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.
— Joan Didion
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
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. 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. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
— Joan Didion, On Self-Respect
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
— Joan Didion
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.
— Joan Didion
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
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
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