socializing
Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing…For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating.
“Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group,” The Atlantic, March 2003.
I should add…that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive, of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking.
The Art of Loving (New York: Perennial Library, 1974), 95–96.
Thanks so much for your letter. I am very glad to hear you have a novel that will be out in November. I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea. If you don’t send me a copy of your book, I will go to the extreme of buying one.
Letter to Robie Macauley, May 2, 1952, in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 35.
The vampires in your life can’t be cured. Your best bet is to stay away from them. As Lynda Barry said, “You cannot fix Dracula by trying to convince him to just party in the sun with you.”
Seating plans, in my opinion, are a form of social incarceration.
The Giant’s House (New York: The Dial Press, 1996), 125.
You asked me to come and see you—I must speak of that. I thank you, A., but I don’t go from home, unless emergency leads me by the hand, and then I do it obstinately, and draw back if I can. Should I ever leave home, which is improbable, I will, with much delight, accept your invitation; till then, my dear A., my warmest thanks are yours, but don’t expect me.
ca. July 26, 1853 letter to Abiah Root, in Letters: Emily Dickinson, selected and ed. by Emily Fragos (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2011), 116.
All this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.
The Edible Woman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999), 112.
The joy of my life with Harry is coming home from a fancy dinner with Harry—and Harry always hates the dinner, whatever it is—and him making himself a marmalade on toast standing in the kitchen and him ranting, “How the hell could it have gone on as long as it did?”
“Tina Brown Is Still Hungry For Buzz,” by Peter Stevenson, The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2011.
Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant. As a kid, I never knew what to say to anyone. It was only as a teenage musician that I improved my people chops. I learned how to talk to others by talking about music. At fifteen, I couldn’t say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.
The Partly Cloudy Patriot (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 91.
I must slough off people—too many connections, too many people, too many entanglements. But it will take all the time just saying no. I don’t help them, they don’t help me. It’s just bitter useless waste of lives, time, soul—everything.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 23.
I do think that socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.
The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, September 30, 2010.
Sharing a beer on the porch is not something a New Orleanian must schedule two weeks in advance.
“Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, How New Orleans Saved Its Soul,” The Washington Post, August 22, 2010.