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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Grief
Expect
Comes
Nothing
Like

More quotes by Joan Didion

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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 lead a very conventional life.
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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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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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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
Joan Didion
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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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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 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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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.
Joan Didion
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I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
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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.
Joan Didion