Joan Didion

I had the distinct sense that everyone I knew had some fever which had not yet infected the invisible city.

I remember taking a 25-mg. Compazine one Easter Sunday and making a large and elaborate lunch for a number of people, many of whom were still around on Monday.

We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

"All those stairs," they murmured, as if stairs could no longer be tolerated by human physiology.

That such an afternoon would now seem implausible in every detail - the idea of having had a "date" for a football lunch now seems to me so exotic as to be almost czarist - suggests the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.

There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.

...and at night, most nights, I walked outside and looked up to where the cyclotron and the bevatron glowed on the dark hillside, unspeakable mysteries which engaged me, in the style of my time, only personally.

Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries, even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirectly, every day.

I read Camus and Henry James and I watched a flowering plum come in and out of blossom...

I've put away nonfiction things, but I've never put away a novel

All such images were personal, and the personal was all that most of us expected to find.

I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed...

I remember certain small things that seemed to me somehow explications, dazzling in their clarity, of the world I was about to enter.

I was working at Vogue during the day, and at night I would work on these scenes for a novel. In no particular sequence. When I finished a scene I would tape the pages together and pin the long strips of pages on the wall of my apartment.

Most of us live less theatrically, but remain survivors of a peculiar and inward time.

I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby's hair.