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Joan Didion

Joan Didion (/ˈdɪdiən/; December 5, 1934 - December 23, 2021) was an American writer who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Didion's writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hollywood lifestyle.

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A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

– Joan Didion

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A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

– Joan Didion

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California: The west coast of Iowa.

– Joan Didion

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Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs.

– Joan Didion

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Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

– Joan Didion

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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.

– Joan Didion

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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.

– Joan Didion

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Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

– Joan Didion

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Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

– Joan Didion

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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

– Joan Didion

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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. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

– Joan Didion

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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

– Joan Didion

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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth... is potentially to have everything...

– Joan Didion

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We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

– Joan Didion

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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

– Joan Didion

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"Joan Didion Quotes." Quotes.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 Apr. 2024. <https://www.quotes.net/authors/Joan+Didion+Quotes>.

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