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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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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Life
Choices
Anyone
Gone
Point
Devoid
Free
Span
Night
Memory
Ever
Choice
Time
Memories

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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.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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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.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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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.
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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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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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 have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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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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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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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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