Seven Joan Didion quotes that reveal what made her writing so singular

Joan Didion is one of those writers whose lines seem to follow you around. There are lines I have read, then underlined, then found again years later in someone else’s essay, in the margins of a notebook, in the kind of conversation that starts with books and ends somewhere closer to confession.

The danger, of course, is that Didion can become over-quoted and under-read. Her sentences are so clean, so sharp, and so immediately recognisable that they sometimes get flattened into aesthetic objects: elegant, detached, devastating. But the best Joan Didion quotes do much more than sound good. They point to something essential in her work: how she thought about writing, selfhood, memory, control, and the stories people tell in order to survive.