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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Become
Going
Kind
Unhinged
Things
Hysterical
Like
Temper
Recognize
Lose
Loses

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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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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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The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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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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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
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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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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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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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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
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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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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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What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
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I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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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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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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