Quote

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.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Crazy
Control
Seeing
Counter
Idea
Runs
Running
Required
Giving
Investment
Real
Things
Straight

More quotes by Joan Didion

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I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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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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I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.
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I've always been fascinated with marine geography and how deep things are. I was spellbound by the tsunami, for example, by the actual maps. There is just something about the unseen bottom of the sea that has always fascinated me, how deep is it.
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Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.
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We all survive more than we think we can.
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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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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.
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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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To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
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There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.
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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
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I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
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I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
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New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.
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I hadn't thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am.
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The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Joan Didion
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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
Joan Didion