Lucie Moody

“I sat by the window and watched the ice floes on the Hudson and thought about the sentence. It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making. It was not the kind of sentence, if you had written it, you would want wrong, but neither was it the kind of sentence, if that was the way you had written it, you would want changed. How had he written it? What did he have in mind? How would he want it? The decision was left to me. Any choice I made could carry the potential for abandonment, even betrayal. That was one reason I was crying in Quintana’s hospital room. When I got home that night I checked the previous galleys and manuscripts. The error, if it was an error, had been there from the beginning. I left it as it was. Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking