How easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy.

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About Joan Didion

Joan Didion (; December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.

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I . . . have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

—Joan Didion

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The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake . . . but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

—Joan Didion

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Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself.

—Joan Didion

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

—Joan Didion

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Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

—Joan Didion

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You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

—Japanese proverb

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The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.

—James A. Froude

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A man's character is his fate.

—Hermann Hesse

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Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character.

—Heraclitus

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Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.