Quote of the Day

Mountaineers line up as they climb a slope during their ascent to summit Mount Everest. [Lakpa Sherpa/AFP] 2021, not 1996

Chapter Nine of Into Thin Air by John Krakauer opens with this quote:

Camp Two  April 28, 1996  21,300 Feet 

We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . .  We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson of the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. - Joan Didion, The White Album

Wikipedia has a page about Joan's book: 

The White Album is a 1979 book of essays by Joan Didion. Like her previous book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album is a collection of works previously published in magazines such as Life and Esquire. The subjects of the essays range widely and represent a mixture of memoir, criticism, and journalism, focusing on the history and politics of California in the late 1960s and early 70s.