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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Remember
Whoever
Love
Hardest
Obsessively
Claims
Wrenches
Loves
Renders
Image
Remakes
Shapes
Radically
Forever
Remembers
Place
Belongs

More quotes by Joan Didion

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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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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.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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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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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
Joan Didion
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
Joan Didion
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
Joan Didion