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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Great
Lying
Free
Others
Power
Singular
Give
Ethics
Back
Expectations
Self
Lies
Giving
Respect
More quotes by Joan Didion
I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
Joan Didion
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan Didion
It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
Joan Didion
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion
Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Joan Didion
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion
Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
Joan Didion
Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
Joan Didion
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion
What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
Joan Didion
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
Joan Didion
California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
