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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. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be."
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"To forget is to blithely toss aside the hard lessons that were hard won by others before us, thereby needlessly dooming us to endure the hard lessons that are likely to be forgotten by those who will follow us. And it is altogether reasonable that in order to avoid this repetitive trouncing, God graciously granted us memories."

"What exactly did you find in Atlanta?Frank unzipped his backpack and started bringing out souvenirs. "Some peach preserves. A couple of T-shirts. A snow globe. And, um, these not-really-Chinese handcuffs.Annabeth forced herself to stay calm. "How about you start from the top-of the story, not the backpack."

"Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds."

"Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."

"Few things are more deceptive than memories."

"He trailed through hallways, ducking under arms no longer there, excusing himself as he pressed through conversations long since ended."
Explore more quotes by Joan Didion

"I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response."

"As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become..."

"I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness."

"We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as 'ordinary blessings."

"A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age."

"I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story."

"I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future."

"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"
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