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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
Read
Craziness
Nothing
Sanity
Really
Express
Seemed
Grief
Aspect
Exactly
Interesting
Tenuous
More quotes by Joan Didion
When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
Joan Didion
On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
Joan Didion
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Joan Didion
My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
Joan Didion
I don't know what I think until I write it down.
Joan Didion
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
Joan Didion
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
Joan Didion
For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
Joan Didion
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
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.
Joan Didion
He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
Joan Didion
any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Joan Didion
Information is control.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.
Joan Didion
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Joan Didion
