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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Self
Constitutes
Potentially
Esteem
Confidence
Worth
Respect
Sense
Everything
Intrinsic

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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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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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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We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.
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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.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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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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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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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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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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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Joan Didion