Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. - Joan Didion

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.

When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.
One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.

I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?