A Book of Common Prayer Quotes

“I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“We all remember what we need to remember.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim "the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude," and it was characteristic of Charlotte that whenever the phrase "realistic but optimistic" appeared in a school communique she read it as "realistic and optimistic.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“I think I loved Charlotte in that moment as a parent loves the child who has just fallen from a bicycle, met a pervert, lost a prize, come up in any way against the hard­ness of the world.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“I think I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract. So dark and febrile and outside the range of the normal did all aspects of this contract seem to Charlotte that she was for example incapable of walking normally across a room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had ac­cess to it and who did not.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“I mean that's pretty much what happens everywhere, isn't it," she said. "Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn't show?”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”
― Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer