"A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique." (18)

Consider the following quotations from Democracy about the act of writing, or about this novel specifically.

What does each mean in its context?
How can we use them to talk about writing?
What do they say in particular about Didion's style?
How might they help us interpret the novel?


page 32: "First looks are widely believed instructive. The first glimpse of someone across a room, the first view of the big house on the rise, the first meeting between the protagonists: these are considered obligatory scenes, and are meant to be remembered later, recalled to a conclusive point, recalled not only by novelists but by survivors of accidents and by witnesses to murders; recalled in fact by anyone at all forced to resort to the narrative method.
I wonder."


page 108: "Aerialists know that to look down is to fall.
Writers know it too."


page 109: "The morning I bought this postcard [featuring the Kuala Lumpur International Airport] was one of several mornings, not too many, four or five mornings over a period of some years, when I believed I held this novel in my hand."


page 162: "I know the conventions and how to observe them, how to fill in the canvas I have already stretched; know how to tell you what he said and she said and know above all, since the heart of narrative is a certain calculated ellipsis, a tacit contract between writer and reader to sruprise and be surprised."


page 215: "When novelists speak of the unpredictability fo human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact. Examine the picture. Find the beast in the jungle, the figure in the carpet.
Context clues.
The reason why."


page 233: "Perhaps because nothing in this situation encourages the basic narrative assumption, which is that the past is prologue to the present, the options remain open here."