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9523045
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Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes.
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Joan Didion |
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96f3dbd
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some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
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life
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Joan Didion |
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f494b48
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1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States . . .
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Joan Didion |
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7f012eb
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Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.
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Joan Didion |
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45f8be7
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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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food
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Joan Didion |
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c991d01
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I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm.
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Joan Didion |
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2bba402
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New people could be seen, by people like my grandfather, as indifferent to everything that had made California work, but the ambiguity was this: new people were also who were making California rich.
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Joan Didion |
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50885f7
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In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.
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Joan Didion |
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f8d65a2
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Discussion of how California has 'changed,' then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it.
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Joan Didion |
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08ab542
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My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.
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Joan Didion |
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549d9f1
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Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE an..
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Joan Didion |
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9caa73c
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You're a professional. Finish the piece. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
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Joan Didion |
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bbbdff4
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perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
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Joan Didion |
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70b1e27
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As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
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Joan Didion |
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00a170c
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Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.
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Joan Didion |
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8c37e2b
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It's not you. It's anyone. Sometimes I don't want anyone around. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.
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Joan Didion |
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96bf9b5
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To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.
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Joan Didion |
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1e60f50
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During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.
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Joan Didion |
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50106bf
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Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
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omens
grief-and-loss
survivors
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Joan Didion |
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b3c6766
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Her choices, all. Sentimental choices, things she remembered. I remembered them too.
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Joan Didion |
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b014b57
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There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
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Joan Didion |
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9128fe0
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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.
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Joan Didion |
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490d108
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Privilege" is something else. "Privilege" is a judgment. "Privilege" is an opinion. "Privilege" is an accusation."
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privilege
opinion
judgment
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Joan Didion |
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dde5d80
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The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer a..
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Joan Didion |
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188b684
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It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.
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g-n-p
united-states-of-america
brave
social
spring
purpose
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Joan Didion |
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72b99a0
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And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed toga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments..
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Joan Didion |
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3935bb0
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One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say."
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Joan Didion |
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27b788f
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Tell me," a rabbi asked Daniel Bell when he said, as a child, that he did not believe in God. "Do you think God cares?")"
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Joan Didion |
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49af150
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Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is "nothing."
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play-it-as-it-lays
joan-didion
nothing
questions
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Joan Didion |
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b7b2c0f
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unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother's teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now an..
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Joan Didion |
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fce3943
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Some men (fewer women) are solitary, unattached to any particular place or institution, most comfortable not exactly alone but in the presence of strangers.
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Joan Didion |
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80a2cdf
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Always when I play back my father's voice," Maria says, "it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don't do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply."
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Joan Didion |
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18d76cc
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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, fo..
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Joan Didion |
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dea1ecc
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Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.
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Joan Didion |
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207998c
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One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks "stardust" or "caesar's palace." Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with "real" life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. But Las Vegas seems to exist..
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Joan Didion |
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a04fd9d
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More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child's primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living.
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Joan Didion |
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309b2f5
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We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings."
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Joan Didion |
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e5701e1
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Of course the activists--not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic--had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, Ave could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longe..
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youth
family
language
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Joan Didion |
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194444b
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That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses ..
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wealth
freedom
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Joan Didion |
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777ccb1
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In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you're married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but ..
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Joan Didion |
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ff70a6f
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This sense that the world can be reinvented [evokes] the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring...
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Joan Didion |
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1d3770e
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No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely. Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already at the threatening point, and none have the right to feel hurt if they are told they can neither be of us..
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Joan Didion |
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9108111
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Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.
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Joan Didion |
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95e46d7
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Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day.
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Joan Didion |