The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “Joan Didion”

Joan Didion on Learning Not to Mistake Self-Righteousness for Morality
Joan Didion on Learning Not to Mistake Self-Righteousness for Morality

“When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something … but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen.”

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Joan Didion on Hollywood’s Diversity Problem: A Masterpiece from 1968 That Could Have Been Written Today
Joan Didion on Hollywood’s Diversity Problem: A Masterpiece from 1968 That Could Have Been Written Today

“The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth.”

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Joan Didion on Driving as Secular Worship and Self-Transcendence
Joan Didion on Driving as Secular Worship and Self-Transcendence

“Participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway.”

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Vanessa Redgrave Reads Joan Didion’s Harrowing ‘Blue Nights’
Vanessa Redgrave Reads Joan Didion’s Harrowing ‘Blue Nights’

“Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

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Joan Didion on Storytelling, the Economy of Words, and Facing Rejection
Joan Didion on Storytelling, the Economy of Words, and Facing Rejection

“Short stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.”

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The Outsider with the Public Voice: How Joan Didion Mirrored Us Back to Ourselves
The Outsider with the Public Voice: How Joan Didion Mirrored Us Back to Ourselves

“From the first, her work insisted that a single life contained the life of our times.”

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Joan Didion’s Favorite Recipes
Joan Didion’s Favorite Recipes

Chicken hash for Patti Smith, parsley salad for forty guests, and other edible fragments of a life that feminized the literary myth.

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Joan Didion’s Favorite Books of All Time, in a Handwritten Reading List
Joan Didion’s Favorite Books of All Time, in a Handwritten Reading List

A living anatomy of influences, from Brontë to Baldwin.

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Joan Didion Answers the Proust Questionnaire
Joan Didion Answers the Proust Questionnaire

“Misery is feeling estranged from people I love. Misery is also not working. The two seem to go together.”

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Joan Didion on Grief
Joan Didion on Grief

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”

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