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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Lasts
Last
Right
Always
Life
Word

More quotes by 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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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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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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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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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.
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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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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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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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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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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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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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[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.
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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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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Joan Didion
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Information is control.
Joan Didion
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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.
Joan Didion