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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Potentially
Esteem
Confidence
Worth
Respect
Sense
Everything
Intrinsic
Self
Constitutes

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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.
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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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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.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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.
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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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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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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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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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Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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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.
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