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Joan Didion

Joan Didion Quotes

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Famous Joan Didion Quotes

“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it. Anyone can "drive" on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going. Actual participation requires total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”

PeopleThinkingWayMindKindSeemsLosingCleanMereDrivingSurrenderIntenseRhythmConcentrationLos AngelesSecularCommunionParticipationVocationLanesRaptureResistingParticipatingFreewaysDriving On
Author:Joan Didion
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“The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what 'fairness' has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”

ThinkingMeanStoriesCommunityDealsPracticeTheoryIndustryNewsIdealsManagementExcuseCoreFamiliarLazyAgreementFairnessPietyPreoccupationBenignPassivityAutopilotLazy Thinking
Author:Joan Didion
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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.”

PeopleThinkingKnowsMindWellsUsedNightTurnsTermCompanyDoorsDemandSurpriseUsed To BeAttractiveBetrayedYour PastDesertedAmendsNoddingBethlehemMagical ThinkingBad NightMaking Amends
Author:Joan Didion
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“It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.”

PeopleThinkingMenWantLoveDreamLastsDesireNationsSocialVirtueImpossibleSeeingRemainsAdmirePrizeAntisocial
Author:Joan Didion
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