#august2015reads

[tziganeheart]

Everything Maria could think to do in the town she had already done.

Play It as It Lays Joan Didion 

[tziganeheart]

'I mean the word dating? Doesn't it strike you funny?' 'Not particularly.'

Play It As It Lays Joan Didion 

[tziganeheart]

In the end it was just a New York story.

Play It As It Lays Joan Didion

[tziganeheart]

not want to, recognized her, knew her, has her number, understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea. In that empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on any shore Maria knew were toxic.

Play It as It Lays Joan Didion

The reality of romace

[tziganeheart]

In the story Maria told herself at three or four in the morning there were only three people and none of them had histories, only the man and the woman and the child and, in the lamplight, the opalescent mussel shells.

Play It As It Lays Joan Didion 

the anchor of personal histories; the stories we tell ourselves; opalescent

[tziganeheart]

.. knew how the wild grass ran down to the beach and where the rocks made tidal pools

Play It As It Lays Joan Didion 

locational memory (what happens when we revist locations only to find them different? or to find them the same but we are different?) 

[tziganeheart]

Within these four rented walls she was safe. She was more than safe, she was all right: she had seen herself on Interstate 80 just before the news and she looked all right. Warm, content, suffused with tentative small resolves, Maria fell asleep before the news was over.

Joan Didion Play It As It Lays

[tziganeheart]

The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tujunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquility.

Joan Didion Play It As It Lays (104)