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I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Made
Kind
Transitions
Deranged
Relying
Slightly
Transition
Natural
Someone

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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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I have an investment in not being crazy. I have a real investment in seeing things straight. This runs counter to that investment, so it required giving up an idea of myself, the idea being that I had control.
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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
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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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Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
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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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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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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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Something I've always known about the screen is that if it's anything in the world, it's literal. It's so literal that there's a whole lot you can't do because you're stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.
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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.
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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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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
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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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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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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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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.
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