“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave. Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“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 Tajunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquility.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“Tell me what matters," BZ said.
Nothing," Maria said.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“You talk crazy any more and I'll leave.
Leave. For Christ's sake leave.
She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. All right.
Don't, he would say then. Don't.
Why do you say those things. Why do you fight.
He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. To find out if you're alive.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano's situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“In was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“Always when I play back my father’s voice,” Maria says, “it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“Cos’è che rende malvagio Jago? Si chiede certa gente. Io non me lo chiedo mai.
Altro esempio, un esempio che viene in mente perché la signora Burstein stamattina ha visto un serpentello a sonagli tra i carciofi dell’orto e d’allora in poi è stata intrattabile: io non faccio mai domande sui serpenti. Perché il profumo Shalimar dovrebbe attrarre i crotali. Perché una serpe corallo dovrebbe aver bisogno di due ghiandole di veleno neurotossico per sopravvivere, mentre una serpe reale, che le somiglia in modo impressionante, non ne ha assolutamente bisogno. Dov’è andata a finire la logica darwiniana, in questo caso. Si potrebbe chiederselo. Io non me lo chiederei mai, né mi chiederei altro. Ricordo un episodio riportato non molto tempo fa nel Herald Examiner di Los Angeles: due sposini in luna di miele, originari di Detroit, trovati morti nel loro furgone Ford nei pressi di Boca Raton, un serpente corallo ancora arrotolato nella termocoperta. Perché? A meno che non si sia disposti a guardare le cose in una prospettiva più ampia, non ci sono «risposte» soddisfacenti a domande del genere.
Ecco. Io sono quel che sono. La ricerca delle «ragioni» non mi riguarda.”
― Joan Didion, quote from Play It as It Lays
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Just because you’re an asshole doesn’t mean I have to be a bitch.”
― Jenna Black, quote from Glimmerglass
“Brenna jumped to her feet the second Father Sinclair entered the chamber. "I'm so happy to see you," she cried out.
"Be happy sitting down," Jamie ordered, hovering over her patient like a mother hen.”
― Julie Garwood, quote from The Wedding
“Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.”
― Eben Alexander, quote from Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife
“—¿Y qué ocurre cuando uno muere?
—Tampoco yo lo sé.
—Entonces, ¿por qué tener miedo? —dice Oswald—. Yo creo que no ocurre nada.
Y si ocurre algo que es mejor que nada, pues mejor que mejor.
—¿Y si lo que ocurre es peor que nada? —le digo.
—No existe nada peor que nada. Pero si no es nada, no podré saberlo porque yo no seré nada.
Oyéndolo hablar así, siento que Oswald es un genio.
—Pero, y si no existes, ¿qué? —le pregunto—. El mundo entero seguirá viviendo
sin ti. Como si nunca hubieras pasado por aquí. Y el día en que todas las personas que has conocido también hayan muerto, será como si nunca, nunca hubieras existido. ¿No te
parece una pena que pase eso?
—Si salvo a Max, no. Si lo salvo, existiré para siempre.”
― Matthew Dicks, quote from Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend
“The greenness of nature is the lives of plants and trees. Green is life. And that’s the reason we love to go out for walks.”
― quote from The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
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