Xigris as Eli Lilly’s “sleeping giant”
Since Quintana is to be treated with the drug Xigris to combat sepsis, Joan reads about it. A description she finds depicts the drug as powerful but not yet fully recognized.
“Sometimes you feel like a nut.”
Joan reads a crossword clue “Somethings you feel like” and thinks “a motherless child,” a thought which she recognizes as self-pitying. The correct answer, she learns reading the next day’s paper, is “a nut.”
“He now had a death sentence, temporarily suspended.”
After John’s angiogram in 1987 reveals a life-threatening heart condition he is operated on and survives. However, he feels that he will likely die of it at a later time.
“Each of these conversations was curiously open, as if we had found ourselves stranded together on an island.”
While in Indonesia, John and Joan meet the Blacks, a couple they admire, though they are very friendly with them only for a short time.
“Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”
Didion writes that the difference between just thinking about love and thinking about marriage is that marriage involves much more of oneself. This is due to a long history of shared experience and lifestyle.
