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We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
Joan Didion
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Joan Didion
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Murder
Workable
Lessons
Sermon
Choices
Interpret
Moral
Sermons
Five
Select
Social
Multiple
Look
Lesson
Looks
Suicide
More quotes by Joan Didion
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
Joan Didion
Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
Joan Didion
Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.
Joan Didion
I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
Joan Didion
What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.
Joan Didion
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
Joan Didion
I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.
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 myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.
Joan Didion
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.
Joan Didion
The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
Joan Didion
Writers are always selling somebody out.
Joan Didion
Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
Joan Didion
A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.
Joan Didion
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
Joan Didion
I have not been the witness I wanted to be.
Joan Didion
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.
Joan Didion
I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control.
Joan Didion
