Favorite Joan Didion Quotes

The best quotes from Joan Didion’s nonfiction

Photo by David Tomaseti on Unsplash

The world lost a brilliant voice on December 23, 2021 when author Joan Didion passed away at the age 87. As the author of numerous texts including Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking (winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2005), Didion wrote about life, death, and grief in a way that mesmerized readers.

Included here are just a few quotes from her writing to be appreciated by both new and lifelong fans.

• “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” —Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations
• “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — The White Album
• “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.” — The Year of Magical Thinking
• “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” — Blue Nights
• “It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.” — “Goodbye to All That”
• “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…