The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down.

A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.