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Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.

— 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)

All Joan Didion quotes →

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.