Play it as it Lays

“Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing.”

— Pg. 210, Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

“ “What do you think about it,” Maria asked Carter.

“About what.”

“What I just told you. About the man at the trailer camp who told his wife he was going out for a walk in order to talk to God.”

“I wasn’t listening, Maria. Just give me the punch line.”

“There isn’t any punch line, the highway patrol just found him dead, bitten by a rattlesnake.”

“I’ll

“She realized that she had expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would rash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in

“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. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get.”

— Pg. 170-171, Play it as

“She thought about nothing.”

— Pg. 170, Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

“ …the idea simultaneously materialized and assumed a real plausibility. It was something people did when they did not know what else to do, they went to New York for a few days.”

“All that day Maria thought of fetuses in the East River, translucent as jellyfish, floating past the big sewage outfalls with the orange peels. She did not go to New

“She would do what he wanted. She would do this one last thing and then they would never be able to touch her again.”

— Pg. 74, Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

“ …and my father keeping a fifth of Jim Beam on the floorboard and talking about his plans, he always had a lot of plans, I never in my life had any plans, he always had a lot of plans, none of it makes any sense, none of it adds up.”

— Pg. 7, Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

“Maria was wearing the silver vinyl dress she had bought to make her feel better and her hair was loose and her feet were bare and driving up through the canyon in the actor’s Ferrari she felt good for the first time in a long while.”

“…she smoked one and then went to find a Coca-Cola. In the kitchen she danced by herself and felt a little dizzy