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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: 90
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Simply
Doomed
Experience
Motherhood
Way
Extreme
Things
Extremes
Consider
Commitment
Looked
Marriage
Commitments

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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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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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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
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Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
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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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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
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My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular.
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
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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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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.
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