"What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one pl..."
- Joan Didion
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
"The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried."
"The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people ..."
"Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we w..."
"[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things."
"We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings."
"When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children."
"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."
"Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar."