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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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Lines
Surveillance
Death
Brush
Away
Brushes
Keep
Ground
Might
Sight
Early
Coil
Line
Cleared
Learned
Unnoticed

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There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
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Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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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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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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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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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 found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
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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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we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
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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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