I'm glad I read this book because it's a work of art and craft, but wow, I felt out of it because I wasn't alive in the 60s, and I have a very dim grasp of events at that time. But Didion can't be beat for a turn of phrase, and I felt like each piece was a class in economy and forthrightness. I loved "On Keeping a Notebook" especially.

Where the Kissing Never Stops
She did not want, then or ever, to entertain; she wanted to move people, to establish with them some communion of emotion.

On Keeping a Notebook
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

...our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I."

...bits of the mind's string--too short to use...

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.

On Going Home
...some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place that I came from.

Letter from Paradise, 21' 19"N, 157' 52"W
I lack all temperament for paradise, real or facsimile.

Goodbye to All That
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.

I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.