{"author":"Joan Didion","author_id":"Joan+Didion","total_quotes":104,"quotes":[{"text":"I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["culture","identity"],"id":68,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["courage","mistakes","self-respect"],"id":10650,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["existence","joan-didion","literature","writing"],"id":11219,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"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. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["compulsion","writing"],"id":11810,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["sure","physical strength "],"id":20957,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["wednesday","clouds","book "],"id":22921,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["alone","death"],"id":27594,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"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.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["emotional-roots","identity","past","personal-history","self"],"id":30904,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["death","food"],"id":32470,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"},{"text":"The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.","author":"Joan Didion","tags":["desire","irony","love","marriage"],"id":33899,"author_id":"Joan+Didion"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":104,"pages":11,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}