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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Dream
Thought
Find
Writing
Dreaming

More quotes by Joan Didion

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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
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Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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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.
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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Joan Didion
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
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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
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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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.
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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.
Joan Didion
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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
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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
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
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I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
Joan Didion