Quote

I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Problem
Solve
Feels
Seem
Never
Somebody
Open
Doesn
Keen
Else
Adoption
Someone
Abandoned
Seems
Main

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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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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.
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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.
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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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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
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Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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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?
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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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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.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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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.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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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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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.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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