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9a42c5c
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the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.
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Joan Didion |
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d9aa109
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In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theor..
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Joan Didion |
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9cfb3de
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To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone "oppressed" to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make fifty-one per cent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. The creation of this revolutionary "class" was from the virtual beginning the "idea" of the women's movement, and the tendency for popular discussi..
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Joan Didion |
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4dbaaab
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try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?
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Joan Didion |
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923155e
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Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild.
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Joan Didion |
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a637650
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What happened in New York and Washington and abroad seemed to impinge not at all upon the Sacramento min. I remember being taken to call upon a very old woman, a rancher's widow, who was reminiscing (the favored conversational mode in Sacramento) about the son of some contemporaries of hers. 'That Johnston boy never did amount to much,' she said. Desultorily, my mother protested: Alva Johnston, she said, had won the Pulitzer Prize, when he ..
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sacramento
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Joan Didion |
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175edb1
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Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions" and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means."
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Joan Didion |
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ffb9ddc
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My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
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Joan Didion |
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5bfffb6
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You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing -- beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code -- what is "right" and what is "wrong," what is "good" and what "evil." I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of "morality" seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightfo..
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Joan Didion |
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dfc5596
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Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.
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Joan Didion |
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308fe01
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She never puts on any weight, you'll notice that's often true of selfish women.
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Joan Didion |
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d59b7b1
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Fui escritora a vida inteira: enquanto escritora, ainda mesmo em crianca e muito antes de o que escrevia comecar a ser publicado, desenvolvi a percepcao de que os significados residem nos ritmos das palavras, das frases e dos paragrafos, tecnica de resguardar atras de um verniz cada vez mais impenetravel qualquer pensamento ou conviccao pessoais. O modo como escrevo e quem eu sou ou em quem me tornei; porem, neste caso, quisera ter, em vez ..
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Joan Didion |
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328c1a4
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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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0df0e01
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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.
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marriage
love
partnership
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Joan Didion |
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a5ddf9f
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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.
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Joan Didion |
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7fc400e
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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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7eb1161
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I just can't get that monster out of my mind.
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Joan Didion |
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9a92805
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In the popular imagination, the American motion-picture industry still represents a kind of mechanical monster, programmed to stifle and destroy all that is interesting and worthwhile and "creative" in the human spirit."
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Joan Didion |
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19da836
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That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than when I am home. Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one's past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room.
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Joan Didion |
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bf5612b
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I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own.
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Joan Didion |
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59bfdc5
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She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and 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..
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Joan Didion |
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bf854ae
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I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error)
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Joan Didion |
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ab1cbe3
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because in at least one respect California--the California we are talking about--resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?
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Joan Didion |
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5a3799c
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It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone's memory is no true memory at all but only the traces of someone else's memory, stories handed down on the family network.
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Joan Didion |
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71a3312
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You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.
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Joan Didion |
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0c76eee
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Sacramento was the least typical of the Valley towns, and it is--but only because it is bigger and more diverse, only because it has had the rivers and the legislature; its true character remains the Valley character, its virtues the Valley virtues, its sadness the Valley sadness.
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Joan Didion |
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d9d97ff
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August comes on not like a month but like an affliction.
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Joan Didion |
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39059db
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In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.
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Joan Didion |
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d27b0d9
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But perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that they will be missing something. Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older;
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Joan Didion |
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3edd308
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Not since Mr. Kaiser," they would say, as if the construction of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on a few acres of reclaimed tidal flat near Fort De Russy had in one swing of the builder's crane wiped out their childhoods and their parents' childhoods, blighted forever some subtropical cherry orchard where every night in the soft blur of memory the table was set for forty-eight in case someone dropped by; as if Henry Kaiser had personally condem..
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Joan Didion |
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0bc8d69
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I did that on purpose,' Lucille Miller told Erwin Sprengle later, 'to save myself from letting my heart do something crazy.
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Joan Didion |
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917f471
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As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.
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Joan Didion |
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9f16fa3
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Above all, she is the girl who "feels" things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young."
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Joan Didion |
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25d3a1a
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I'm not optimistic, darling, but I'm hopeful. There's a difference. I'm hopeful.
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Joan Didion |
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86e170b
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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. Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and every..
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Joan Didion |
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d9c68eb
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By now the sky outside is the color of his marble, but they are all reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm.
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Joan Didion |
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573f4cb
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The center was not holding.
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Joan Didion |
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5fde8cc
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We all have our own trips and it is a nice drive.
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Joan Didion |
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9d04193
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Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe? The first to send his wild wild vibrations to all those cosmic superstations? For the song he always shouts sends the planets flipping out... But I'll tell you before you think me loony that I'm talking about Narada Muni... Singing
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Joan Didion |
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3d654ef
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That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day's events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about "shopping,..
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Joan Didion |
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e99b838
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Rarely have we seen so much made over so little.
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Joan Didion |
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5f879c6
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One of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.
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Joan Didion |
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6d29787
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Particularly out here tonight, in this country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter, it is difficult to believe that "the good" is a knowable quantity."
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Joan Didion |
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7951d44
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Across the road at the Faith Community Church a couple of dozen old people, come here to live in trailers and die in the sun, are holding a prayer sing. I cannot hear them and do not want to. What I can hear are occasional coyotes and a constant chorus of "Baby the Rain Must Fall" from the jukebox in the Snake Room next door, and if I were also to hear those dying voices, those Midwestern voices drawn to this lunar country for some unimagin..
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Joan Didion |