"There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could."
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Quote collection
Joan Didion quotes (page 9 of 14)
262 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead."
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"Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American."
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"I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day."
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"One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense."
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"Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting."
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"Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place."
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"The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy."
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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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"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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"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.""
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"You aren't sure if you're making the right decision - about anything, ever."
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"Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep."
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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."
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"You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part."
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"prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat."
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"Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with — or maybe overly focused on — the idea that they can’t display self-pity, they have to be strong. Actually there are a lot of reasons why you are going to feel sorry for yourself, but that’s your first concern."
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"It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it."
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"Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa."
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"Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect."
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