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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
People
Company
Term
Amends
Whether
Bethlehem
Keep
Nodding
Used
Advised
Find
Deserted
Wells
Attractive
Well
Terms

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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky,is where we run out of continent.
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I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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Anything worth having has its price.
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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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I lead a very conventional life.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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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.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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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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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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