Kalyana Gallagher

“The late sun seemed warm and benevolent on her skin and everything she saw looked beautiful, the summer pulse of life itself made manifest.”

— Pg. 82, Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

“I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.”

— Pg. 183, Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

“Sometime in the night Maria wrote three letters which, before dawn, she tore up and flushed down the toilet.”

— Pg. 73, 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 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

“Because her mother had once told her that purple rooms could send people into irreversible insanity she thought about asking for a different room, but the boy had unnerved her. She did not want to court further appraisal by asking anyone for anything.”

— Pg. 165, Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion

“Maria turned away. After that either she or Carter slept most nights in the other room. Some nights he said that he was tired, and some nights she said that she wanted to read, and other nights no one said anything.”

— Pg. 184, 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

“It seemed to her now that she had been driving all week toward precisely this instant.”

— Pg 173, Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion