“It’s good having friends who farm. It’s good to know the names of their cows and the calves that come in the spring. It’s fun to see the new ones when I head up to get eggs from my neighbor. It’s good knowing they would be here in a minute for us anytime day or night, and it’s good knowing they can count on us the same way. We have a 1958 Ford tractor that I love. We have silos and a barn that has been here 100 years. The original house burned down years before we got here. Our house is a little tract house—nothing much at all. But we put on a tin roof and a covered porch and built a masonry bread oven. We have a big garden—man, I’m starting to cry here. It’s not the prettiest farm at all, but it’s the best place I’ve ever lived in my life.”

Lynda Barry

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“When you sweep the house, you find everything.”

Proverb

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“Over a period of thirty years, I have occupied eight caves in New York, eight digs—four in the Village, one on Murray Hill, three in Turtle Bay. In New York, a citizen is likely to keep on the move, shopping for the perfect arrangement of rooms and vistas, changing his habitation according to fortune, whim, and need. And in every place he abandons he leaves something vital, it seems to me, and starts his new life somewhat less encrusted, like a lobster that has shed its skin and is for a time soft and vulnerable.”

E. B. White

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“Only in this sun-steeped country can a heavy table, a wicker chair, an earthenware jar crowned with flowers, and a dish whose thick enameling has run over the edge, make a complete furnishing.”

Colette

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“I’m married to my calling, but I’m not married to a particular woman. I have no pets. My apartment is full of books and records, the light of Toni Morrison and John Coltrane.”

Cornel West

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“Will I ever get home? It is like looking down a tremendous ski jump. The bottom is not so far away in time, but in effort and all one has to give to it, such a mighty jump.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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“I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”

William Faulkner

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“I do know for a fact that a man can’t know the quality of his home until he has lived in it a year or two; and until he knows its good and bad qualities how can he presume to go about remodeling it?”

E. B. White

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“Oh, domesticity! The wonder of dinner plates and cream pitchers. You know your friends by their ornaments. You want everything. If Mrs. A has her mama’s old jelly mold, you want one, too, and everything that goes with it—the family, the tradition, the years of having jelly molded in it. We domestic sensualists live in a state of longing, no matter how comfortable our own places are.”

Laurie Colwin

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