## Metadata * Author: [[Joan Didion]] * ASIN: B072HMBLSM * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072HMBLSM ## Highlights “The West begins,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches.” This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read, — location: [669](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=669) ^ref-43966 --- It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolently “democratic,” flattened out, mediocre and “open” and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn. — location: [722](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=722) ^ref-15387 --- Citizen guerrillas splashed paint and scattered nails in the Diamond Lanes. Diamond Lane maintenance crews expressed fear of hurled objects. — location: [873](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=873) ^ref-21623 --- The men, when they are present, display in the main an affecting awkwardness, an awareness that they have harsher roles, say as mayor of Seattle or president of the Overland Motor Company, a resistance to the world of summering and wintering. — location: [1490](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=1490) ^ref-59905 --- I put The New York Review of Books aside and talk to a pretty young woman who has honeymooned at the Royal, because honeymoons at the Royal are a custom in her family, with each of her three husbands. — location: [1510](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=1510) ^ref-31927 --- A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, — location: [1593](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=1593) ^ref-15193 --- The absence of opinion was construed as opinion. — location: [1958](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=1958) ^ref-34804 --- If I had a center I would have monkeys, and Chinese restaurants, and Mylar kites and bands of small girls playing tambourine. — location: [2042](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=2042) ^ref-64914 --- I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it. 2. — location: [2301](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B072HMBLSM&location=2301) ^ref-13245 ---