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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Innocence
Likes
Oneself
Ends
Disillusionment
Stripped
Delusion

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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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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 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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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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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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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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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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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'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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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.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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