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All this made me think of Joan Didion’s most famous sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s a sentence that has found its way onto Pinterest boards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs, as though it were a consoling affirmation of The Power of Storytelling. It is not.

The sentence is the first one of Didion’s essay “The White Album,” whi... See more

Alan Jacobs • Stories to Live By

This expectation on the part of the Reagans that other people would care for their needs struck many people, right away, as remarkable, and was usually characterized as a habit of the rich. But of course it is not a habit of the rich, and in any case the Reagans were not rich: they, and this expectation, were the products of studio Hollywood, a sys

Joan Didion • After Henry: Essays

On the flight back to L.A. I sit next to an old man who keeps drinking Bloody Marys and mumbling to himself. As the plane makes its descent he asks me if this is my first time in L.A. and I say “Yeah” and the man nods and I put the headset back on and listen to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts sing “Do You Wanna Touch Me?” and tense up as the plane br

Bret Easton Ellis • The Informers (Vintage Contemporaries)

She’s wearing a pistachio Ultrasuede shift that’s probably too fancy for this affair, though McAnnis suspects that Susan Burr stopped caring long ago about the looks she elicits from other women.

Dann McDorman • West Heart Kill: A novel

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion

Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.

Joan Didion • Let Me Tell You What I Mean

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.

Joan Didion • The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage International)

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just 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 a... See more

Joan Didion • Joan Didion's 'lost' commencement address, revealed

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.