didion for mcc

"Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley." 48

"This year's gonna be wild."
"We're gonna just let it all happen...Everything's in the future, you can't pre-plan it. First we get jobs, then a place to live. Then, I dunno." 92

"Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow." 134

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find then attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget." 139

"I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, 'wagon-train-morality'...the only kind of 'morality' that seems to me to have any but the most potentially mendacious meaning." 159

"I would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story." 168

"But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to sop the winds whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay." 208

"Goodbye to All That" 225-7
cannot lay my finger...cut through all the ambiguities...
was anyone ever so young? i am here to tell you that someone was.
it was the triborough and i stayed for eight years

"I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults. That most of us have found adulthood just as morally ambiguous as we expected it to be falls perhaps into the category of prophecies self-fulfilled; I am simply not sure. I am only telling you how it was." 207 WA

"If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending." 208