Play It As It Lays Quotes

“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave. Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“Tell me what matters," BZ said.
Nothing," Maria said.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“In was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that, but I am telling you how it was.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tajunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquility.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“You talk crazy any more and I'll leave.
Leave. For Christ's sake leave.
She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. All right.
Don't, he would say then. Don't.
Why do you say those things. Why do you fight.
He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. To find out if you're alive.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“Always when I play back my father’s voice,” Maria says, “it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano's situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“She never puts on any weight, you’ll notice that’s often true of selfish women.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“As if she had a fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria', she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.

She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that...”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays