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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

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Looked
Marriage
Commitments
Simply
Doomed
Experience
Motherhood
Way
Extreme
Things
Extremes
Consider
Commitment

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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.
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My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
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Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
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Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff.
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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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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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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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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.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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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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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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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.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Marriage is memory, marriage is time.
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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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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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