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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
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Writer
Sacramento
California
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Survive
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More quotes by Joan Didion
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
Joan Didion
I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
Joan Didion
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
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
Joan Didion
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
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Joan Didion
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
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Joan Didion
A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
Joan Didion
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
Joan Didion
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
Joan Didion
