My first notebook was a Big ...

My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.
My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.
 Joan Didion

More phrases

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
 William Tecumseh Sherman
The same mentality that leads to environmental despoliation, environmental destruction, also leads to damage to people.
 Naomi Oreskes
You can't break poor people mentality. Once you grow up poor, you don't take anything for granted. It can have the negative side also because you can never truly be relaxed.
 Will Smith
The man with the average mentality, but with control, with a definite goal, and a clear conception of how it can be gained, and above all, with the power of application and labor, wins in the end.
 William Howard Taft
I think society had to grow up to the mentality of Peter Norman.
 John Carlos

Quotes from the same author

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
 Joan Didion
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves... there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
 Joan Didion
Most death now happens in hospitals. It's been medicalized. It happens away from where we deal with it directly. And that's a huge change. At the beginning of the 20th century most people died at home. Death was much more common.
 Joan Didion
I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
 Joan Didion
I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
 Joan Didion