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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
Self
Lies
Giving
Respect
Great
Lying
Free
Others
Power
Singular
Give
Ethics
Back
Expectations

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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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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.
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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