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Joan Didion Quotes about Pain

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I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you.

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

Joan Didion
Pain, Eye, Scary

Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.

Joan Didion
Pain, Yoga, Anxiety
Joan Didion (2013). “The White Album”, p.115, Zola Books

Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.

Joan Didion
Girl, Pain, Age
Joan Didion (2013). “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, p.42, Zola Books

That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

Joan Didion
Pain, Blessing, Illness
Joan Didion (2013). “The White Album”, p.113, Zola Books

And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.

Joan Didion
Pain, Understanding, Doe
Joan Didion (2006). “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction”, Everyman's Library

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