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Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Grief
Aspect
Exactly
Interesting
Tenuous
Read
Craziness
Nothing
Sanity
Really
Express
Seemed

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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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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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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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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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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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Information is control.
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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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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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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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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something... but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
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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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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
Joan Didion