Ann He

“That’s a strategy – setting everything else aside and going to work – that’s worked very well for you. It’s still the best way to allay anxiety known to man. Work. Better than drugs, better even than alcohol. But she doesn’t have the faith in her work that you have in yours. When she does, she’ll be for all intents and purposes cured.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“This method of learning can be practiced in most endeavors on or off the court. The more you let yourself perform free of control on the tennis court, the more confidence you tend to gain in the beautiful mechanism that is the human body. The more you trust it, the more capable it seems to become.”
― W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

“There was a fear that the energy she needed to undertake this life would go into the attachment, that the attachment had in the first case and could in this case serve as a kind of way out.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John

“I’m saying you can’t let yourself not be. You can’t let yourself make mistakes, be human. Having to be right is like the Midas touch. You think it would be wonderful if everything you touched turned to gold, then you find you’ve turned to gold yourself, stopped being human.”
― Joan Didion, Notes to John