My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend t… - Joan Didion

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

"We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.

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.