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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Children
Notebook
Malcontents
Different
Altogether
Presentiment
Writing
Apparently
Malcontent
Things
Anxious
Notebooks
Lonely
Resistant
Private
Afflicted
Birth
Keepers
Loss
Breed

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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
Joan Didion
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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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.
Joan Didion
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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
Joan Didion
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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 lead a very conventional life.
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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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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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Joan Didion
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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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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
Joan Didion
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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.
Joan Didion
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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?
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
Joan Didion
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
Joan Didion