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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Stills
Inspiring
Still
Doors
Behinds
Wall
Behind
Already
Fear
Influential
Lost
Locked

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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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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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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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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
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It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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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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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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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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