599 Quotes by Joan Didion
- Author Joan Didion
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I put the word "diagnosis" in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a "diagnosis" led to a "cure," or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.
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- Author Joan Didion
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What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.
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- Author Joan Didion
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I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
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- Author Joan Didion
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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. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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- Author Joan Didion
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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
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- Author Joan Didion
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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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- Author Joan Didion
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it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself.
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- Author 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. And I suspect we are already there.
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- Author Joan Didion
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Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
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