Gail

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.”
― Joan Didion

“The redemptive power of the crossing was, nonetheless, the fixed idea of the California settlement, and one that raised a further question: for what exactly, and at what cost, had one been redeemed? When you jettison others so as not be “caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains,” do you deserve not to be caught? When you survive at the cost of Miss Gilmore and her brother, do you survive at all?”
― Joan Didion, Where I Was From

“It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden