Quote

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Sorrow
Waves
Eyes
Sudden
Suffering
Knees
Eye
Wave
Comes
Grief
Apprehensions
Nothing
Distance
Obliterate
Life
Blind
Weaken
Expect
Apprehension

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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?
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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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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.
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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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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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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.
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We are the stories we tell ourselves
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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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You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
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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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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.
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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.
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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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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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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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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