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Joan Didion Inspirational Quotes (134)

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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
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Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
Joan Didion
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
Joan Didion
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
Joan Didion
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
Joan Didion
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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Joan Didion
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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
Joan Didion
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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
Joan Didion
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Joan Didion
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I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
Joan Didion
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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
Joan Didion
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Joan Didion
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
Joan Didion
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
Joan Didion
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
Joan Didion
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
Joan Didion
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
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