Joan Didion Quotes
I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
Quotes to Explore
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When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived in the house with them and us.
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Work is the thing that happens around the game time.
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The underdog winning is the romantic position.
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Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.
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I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.
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The National Security Council's real role is to coordinate the various activities of the government of the United States in the furtherance of American foreign policy.
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When I was working on my Ph.D., I developed a computer algorithm to look for rapid changes in populations' DNA. Our DNA changes constantly over generations, but if certain changes spread through a population more quickly than others, they are probably the beneficial results of natural selection. This is the protection we give ourselves to survive.
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I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.
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Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them.
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The perils of duck hunting are great - especially for the duck.
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The majority of my work is about preparation.
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For me, I love the flavors of Southern food, and people usually think of Southern food as heavy and fattening, but it doesn't have to be.
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Victory belongs to the most persevering.
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The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organising production and distribution and culture will emerge.
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The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.
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If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: 'He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.'
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He don't look the sort of fellow I like; but he's got money and he comes here, and he's good looking, - and therefore he'll be a success.
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I'm so much happier now that people seem to find better things to ask me about than all my 'accomplishments' from when I was a little girl. I feel like that was so long ago, and so irrelevant to who I am now, that I am glad the focus isn't really on that as much any more.
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For the lesson of such stories [of resistance to Nazi atrocities] is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
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Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.
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'There is a steep and lofty wall,Where my warders trembling stand,He who at speed shall ride round its height,For him shall be my hand.'
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
