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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
Recognize
Lose
Loses
Become
Going
Kind
Unhinged
Things
Hysterical
Like
Temper

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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.
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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 never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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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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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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Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.
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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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We all survive more than we think we can.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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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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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.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane one does not 'live' at Xanadu.
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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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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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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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Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character X. I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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