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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Life
Equipped
Ethic
Essentially
Adult
Romantic
Ethics
Adults
Came

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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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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To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
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What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
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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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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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I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
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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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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.
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I lead a very conventional life.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
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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.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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