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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Grammar
Piano
Ears
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More quotes by Joan Didion

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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion
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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
Joan Didion
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
Joan Didion
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
Joan Didion
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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
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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.
Joan Didion
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
Joan Didion
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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
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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.
Joan Didion
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
Joan Didion
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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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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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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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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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