"Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States."
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Quote collection
Joan Didion quotes (page 12 of 14)
262 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. "Everything went white," those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint."
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"When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it."
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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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"Despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, [the death of a parent] dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and may cut free memories and feelings that we thought had gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections."
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"For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I."
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"It is often said that New York is a city for 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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"In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see."
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"My own fantasies of what life would be like at 24 tended to the more spectacular."
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"There must be times when everybody writes when they feel they're evading writing."
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"If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it."
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"Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily."
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"You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will."
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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."
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"I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic."
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"It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places."
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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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"I just read everything I could get my hands on. I taught myself to read or my mother taught me. Who knows how I learned to read? It was before I went to school, so I would go to the library and just take things off the shelf. My mother had to sign a piece of paper saying I could take adult books."
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"Most death now happens in hospitals. It's been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that's a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common."
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"In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way."
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