The Last Thing He Wanted Quotes

“You will notice that participants in disasters typically locate the "beginning" of the disaster at a point suggesting their own control over events. A plane crash retold will not begin with the pressure system over the Central Pacific that caused the instability over the Gulf that caused the wind shear at DFW but at some manageable human intersect, with for example the "funny feeling" ignored at breakfast. An account of a 6.8 earthquake will begin not at the overlap of the tectonic plates but more comfortably, at the place in London where we ordered the Spode that shattered the morning the tectonic plates shifted.
Had we just gone with the funny feeling. Had we just never ordered the Spode.
We all prefer the magical explanation.
(page 15)”
― Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted

“She had been away, yes.
Always good to get back, right.
With weather this dry they were lucky to have gotten through Thanksgiving without a fire, yes.
No way she was ready to start dealing with Christmas, no.
She had sat then in the rental car in the parking lot, almost deserted at four in the afternoon. Four in the afternoon was not the time when women who lived here shopped. Women who lived here shopped in the morning, before tennis, after working out. If she still lived here she would not be sitting in a rental car in the parking lot at four in the afternoon. One of the high school boys who worked in the market after school was stringing up Christmas lights on the board advertising the day's specials. Another was rounding up carts, jamming the carts into long trains and propelling each train into the rack with a single extended finger. By the time the last light dropped behind Point Dume the carts were all racked and the Christmas lights were blinking red and green and she had stopped crying.
(page 153)”
― Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted

“If you put an assassination plot into play you follow it with an assassination attempt. If you stage an assassination attempt you put somebody out front. A front, an assassin. A front with a suitable background. A front who can be silenced in the assassination attempt. The assassination attempt which would or would not fail, depending on exactly how unauthorized the fringe elements turn out to be. A, B, C. One two three. Night follows day. Not rocket science.”
― Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted

“The lesson would have been that no one else will ever view our lives exactly as we do: someone else had looked at the snapshots and seen the two children but had failed to hear the music, had failed even to know or care that he or she was lacking the emotional score.”
― Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted

“sustained reactive depression, a bereavement reaction to the leaving of familiar environments.”
― Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted