Collected Essays Quotes

“Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

“The process today gives everyone a chance to participate,” Tom Hayden, by way of explaining “the difference” between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 a.m. on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. This was, at a convention that had as its controlling principle the notably nonparticipatory idea of “unity”, demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as “anecdotal”. They tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us. They talk about “programs”, and “policy”, and how to “implement” them or it, about “trade-offs” and constituencies and positioning the candidate and distancing the candidate, about the “story”, and how it will “play”. They speak of a candidate’s performance, by which they usually mean his skill at circumventing questions, not as citizens but as professional insiders, attuned to signals pitched beyond the range of normal hearing: “I hear he did all right this afternoon,” they were saying to one another in the press section of the Louisiana”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

“In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

“You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing — beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code — what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work.”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

“It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry

“anise tea. “Meditation turns us on,” Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers.”
― Joan Didion, Collected Essays: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry