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Joan Didion
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“I think nobody owns land until their dead are in it ...”
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“That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”
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“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past ... Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.”
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“... Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called '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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“... innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
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“Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself ...”
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“... character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
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“Self respect ... is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price.”
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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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“... when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”
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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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“... California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
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“Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.”
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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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“It is often said that New York is a city of only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”
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“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”
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“... any compulsion tries to justify itself.”
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“... 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 run 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. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
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“My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.”
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“She can't win if she's not at the table ...”
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“... a hoarder of sexual grievances, a wife.”
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“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
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“He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.”
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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
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“... great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.”
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“That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.”
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“And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.”
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“Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.”
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“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. 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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“In many ways 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. It's an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.”
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“Grammar is a piano I play by ear ... All I know about grammar is its infinite power.”
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“Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.”
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“Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”
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“New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion ...”
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“Life changes fast. / Life changes in the instant. / You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
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“Marriage is memory, marriage is time. ... Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.”
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“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”
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“In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In later years, you fight because you do.”
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“To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.”
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“There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.”
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“I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I've done that day. I can't do it late in the afternoon because I'm too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages.”
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“On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.”
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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.”
Joan Didion, U.S. writer
(1934)
Full name: Joan Didion Dunne.