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f151599
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one more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen.
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Joan Didion |
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0ca9532
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Because 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. And I suspect we are already there.
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Joan Didion |
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08cf33b
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Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?
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impermanence
regret
second-chanc
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Joan Didion |
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8e755a6
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Cos'e che rende malvagio Jago? Si chiede certa gente. Io non me lo chiedo mai. Altro esempio, un esempio che viene in mente perche la signora Burstein stamattina ha visto un serpentello a sonagli tra i carciofi dell'orto e d'allora in poi e stata intrattabile: io non faccio mai domande sui serpenti. Perche il profumo Shalimar dovrebbe attrarre i crotali. Perche una serpe corallo dovrebbe aver bisogno di due ghiandole di veleno neurotossico..
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joan-didion
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Joan Didion |
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e179519
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only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, sleepless. Persons they normally like, they often turn from.
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Joan Didion |
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393fdc3
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In retrospect this had been my omen, my message, the early snowfall, the birthday present no one else could give me.
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Joan Didion |
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0eaca9f
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Philippe Aries, in The Hour of Our Death, points out that the essential characteristic of death as it appears in the Chanson de Roland is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, "gives advance warning of its arrival."
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Joan Didion |
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b1da0f2
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lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
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Joan Didion |
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1b499eb
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About Georgia O'Keeffe:) 'The city men.' 'The men.' 'They.' The words crop up again and again as this astonishingly aggressive woman tells us what was on her mind when she was making her astonishingly aggressive paintings. It was those city men who stood accused of sentimentalizing her flowers: "I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flow..
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Joan Didion |
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044e2cc
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When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day's mail with real enthusiasm--maybe it is Vogue, maybe it is Foreign Affairs, whatever it is we are intensely interested, pleased to have this handbook to keeping up, this key to ..
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Joan Didion |
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4c1d8a6
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and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was.
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Joan Didion |
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212d83f
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both schoolteachers and both dedicated to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, whose members observe the Sabbath on Saturday, believe in an apocalyptic Second Coming, have a strong missionary tendency, and, if they are strict, do not smoke, drink, eat meat, use makeup, or wear jewelry, including wedding rings.
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Joan Didion |
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06b7371
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Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life--both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections--have all vanished.
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death
grief
human-connection
loneliness
survivors
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Joan Didion |
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e92890e
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If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and 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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b577f29
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They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of "brotherhood."
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Joan Didion |
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03bd5f6
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Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.
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miami
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Joan Didion |
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db2db05
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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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Joan Didion |
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4d8f511
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one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties,
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Joan Didion |
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efd15c0
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At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girls' school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care. At thenty-four she left all those opinions behi..
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Joan Didion |
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1a6b7a1
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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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8a051e0
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There he was, he had kept saying later. He was alive and then he was dead and we were watching. We saw him at the instant it happened we knew he was dead before his family did. Just an ordinary day. 'And then--gone.
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Joan Didion |
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8781595
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In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.
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Joan Didion |
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dcf058b
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Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
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Joan Didion |
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e79b747
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NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune."
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Joan Didion |
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9e150d6
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Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in. We miss each other's points, have another drink and regard the fire.
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Joan Didion |
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27248f6
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At least some of the time, the world appears to me as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch; were I to follow my conscience then, it would lead me out onto the desert with Marion Faye, out to where he stood in The Deer Park looking east to Los Alamos and praying, as if for rain, that it would happen: '...let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in th..
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Joan Didion |
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f01ea44
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No one who has ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of a the provincial adolescent.
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Joan Didion |
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638725b
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No one could have missed the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as if in wildlife documentary, when things did not go his [Clinton] way. That famous tendency of the candidate to take a less than forthcoming approach to embarrassing questions that had already been well documented.
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Joan Didion |
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5273d5c
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Huey Newton laid down his life for us," Stokely Carmichael had said the same night. But of course Huey Newton had not yet laid down his life at all, was just here in the Alameda County Jail waiting to be tried," --
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Joan Didion |
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f47356b
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All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it--that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death--could now be declared in valid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.
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Joan Didion |
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c488287
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It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes." "In some ways it was the conventional clandestine affair in a place like San Bernardino, a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed." "January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the ki..
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Joan Didion |
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cfe0f66
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Happiness is,' after all, a consumption ethic.
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consumption
happiness
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Joan Didion |
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aa34a78
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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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a58e1bb
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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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caa653c
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occult enchantment, from that febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos which renders exile so potent an organizing principle.
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Joan Didion |
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6453fa9
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anise tea. "Meditation turns us on," Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers."
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Joan Didion |
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32f0d10
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I never learned the answer, nor did the answer matter, for one of the eerie and liberating aspects of broadcast discourse is that nothing one says will alter in the slightest either the form or the length of the conversation.
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Joan Didion |
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5364271
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I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure.
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Joan Didion |
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dc55e03
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It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.
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Joan Didion |
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d50929f
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent
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Joan Didion |
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bf86b2f
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Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.
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Joan Didion |
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8c84383
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Hawaii is our Gibraltar, and almost our Channel Coast. Planes, their eyes sharpened by the year-round clearness of blue Pacific days, can keep easy watch over an immense sea-circle, of which Hawaii is the centre. With Hawaii on guard, a surprise attack on us from Asia, the experts believe, would be quite impossible. So long as the great Pearl Harbor Naval Base, just down the road from Honolulu, is ours, American warships and submarines can ..
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Joan Didion |
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4ae35f1
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We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are be definition more interesting that ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing ... Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rain trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to aff..
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Joan Didion |
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3690fb6
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Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.
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fame
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Joan Didion |