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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.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Structure
Photographed
Meaning
Shift
Objects
Sentence
Position
Sentences
Writing
Camera
Cameras
Object
Definitely
Alters
More quotes by Joan Didion
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion
It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
Joan Didion
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
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.
Joan Didion
We are the stories we tell ourselves
Joan Didion
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
Joan Didion
I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
Joan Didion
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
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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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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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
I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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
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
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.
Joan Didion
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
