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Joan Didion

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Famous Joan Didion Quotes

“I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the schemes could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No eye was watching me.”

MenMatterMightEyeActionFoundRegretEvidenceIndifferenceExistentialismSatisfyingSchemesAbidingEarthquakesSparrows
Author:Joan Didion
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“It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. "Everything went white," those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint.”

WritingFactsLightWhiteBrainBloodHigherEvidenceFlowPressureInstantConsistentAfterlifeOxygenDeficitDecreaseHigher PowerBlood PressureWhite LightBlood Flow
Book:The Year of Magical Thinking
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“We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."”

PeoplePersonsSelfFeelingsHappensLostLeftFeltFocusWifeAdviceObjectsSourceHusbandFlowPityMediumsPermanentMourningVisibleReportsDividesVery StrongReceivingSelf PityClingingPsychosisApparitions
Author:Joan Didion
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“What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you just to live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm telling you to live in it. Try and get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.”

WorldWantLifeTryingBelieveMomentsUseMightTodayMovingChanceProgressPrideProgramDon't BelieveMessPackagesTake A ChanceClosingMantrasSeize The MomentMight Use
Author:Joan Didion
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“We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.”

MenWayActionSocialFateGenerationsPeriodsOptimismSilentOfficialsJust OneMeaninglessDreadRepressionEscapingExhilarationSocial Action
Author:Joan Didion
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