"The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way."
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Quote collection
Joan Didion quotes (page 8 of 14)
262 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"California: The west coast of Iowa."
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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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"If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum."
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"To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Milly Theale, Temple Drake, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one"
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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 assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed."
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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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"Mourning has its place but also its limits."
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"We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it."
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"Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, 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. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her."
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"He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside."
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"I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it's not the ideal, it's not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybeif I go ahead and finish it anywayI can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance."
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"We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living."
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"I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it."
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"I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing."
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"I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control."
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"We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know."
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"Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be."
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"Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go."
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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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