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New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and the perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.

— Joan Didion

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More quotes by Joan Didion

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.

Why I Write (1975)

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.

Why I Write (1975)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Joan Didion (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.