To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, th… - Joan Didion

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To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

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About Joan Didion

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer known as a novelist, journalist and prose stylist.

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To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Additional quotes by Joan Didion

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness…. To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it.

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