A Quote by Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

Quote Topics

Actual Choices Entirely Experience Five Freeze Ideas Images Imposition Interpret Learned Lesson Line Live Look Moral Most Multiple Multiple Choice Murder Narrative Order Our Ourselves See Select Sermon Shifting Social Stories Suicide Tell Which Writers

Quote Author

Joan Didion
American - Author
Born: December 5, 1934

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.

Joan Didion

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

Joan Didion

It's very important when you are young you don't take sides; you look at everything fresh and see, what is the best thing we can do? For ourselves, for the society in which we live, the country in which we live, the world in which we live, what's the best thing we can do?

Jaggi Vasudev

The media we surround ourselves with allows us to manufacture our own experience every day, which is a perception of the world that is our own invention entirely, whether it is on social media or what we choose to absorb. This was very different when I was a kid, like generations before us we were exposed to things that were not entirely on our terms. We had to wrestle with and find the relationship with the world around you. It was literal experience, unlike the form of protracted psychic masturbation that is the digital world we live in.

Rick Alverson

"Ultimate reality" is the highest, deepest, eternal, unchangeable, source and ground of everything we see, touch, and experience with our five senses. It's that which gives being and meaning to everything finite, mortal, changeable. It's also that toward which we creatures look and live - whether we know it or not - our telos; our goal and purpose.

Roger E. Olson

The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.

Sheena Iyengar

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Joan Didion

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Shekhar Kapur

Most people can look back over the years and identify a time and place at which their lives changed significantly. Whether by accident or design, these are the moments when, because of a readiness within us and a collaboration with events occurring around us, we are forced to seriously reappraise ourselves and the conditions under which we live and to make certain choices that will affect the rest of our lives.

Frederic Flach

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

Curtis Sittenfeld

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

Umberto Eco

The past is a rich resource on which we can draw in order to make decisions for the future, but it does not dictate our choices. We should look back at the past and select what is good, and leave behind what is bad.

Nelson Mandela

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.

Jacob Bronowski

Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable inquiries, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy-which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life.

Wendell Berry

A Quote by Joan Didion

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