"Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power."
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Joan Didion quotes (page 2 of 14)
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"Grammar is a piano I play by ear."
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"Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price."
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"Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write."
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"A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty."
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"Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing."
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"My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point."
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"Writers are always selling somebody out."
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"We all survive more than we think we can."
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"I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is."
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"we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all."
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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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"People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs."
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"This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning."
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"[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before."
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"I don't think anybody feels like they're a good parent. Or if people think they're good parents, they ought to think again."
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"Anything worth having has its price."
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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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"To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed."
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"In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do."
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