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
Eyes
Sudden
Suffering
Knees
Eye
Wave
Comes
Grief
Apprehensions
Nothing
Distance
Obliterate
Life
Blind
Weaken
Expect
Apprehension
Sorrow
Waves

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Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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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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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
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For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.
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Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
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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 another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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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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I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Joan Didion
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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I can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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