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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
Keep
Ground
Might
Sight
Early
Coil
Line
Cleared
Learned
Unnoticed
Lines
Surveillance
Death
Brush
Away
Brushes

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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.
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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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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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We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
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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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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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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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Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
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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.
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Information is control.
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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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 fear is for what is still to be lost.
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I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again.
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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.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
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Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.
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I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.
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