"The wind shows us how close to the edge we are."
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Quote collection
Joan Didion quotes (page 1 of 14)
262 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs."
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"To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self."
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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."
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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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"Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember."
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"We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget."
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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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"The fear is for what is still to be lost."
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"It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit."
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"Short stories demand a certain awareness of one's own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus."
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"Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone."
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"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...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. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
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"That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing."
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"Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service."
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"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
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"What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone."
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"Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins."
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"It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive."
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"Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."
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