
“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.”
Flannery O'Connor
more infosource: 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.
category: author, book party, publishing, socializing
medium: Letter
“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.'”
Austin Kleon
more infosource: Kleon’s Tumblr, December 27, 2012.
category: energy, self-care, socializing, vampire
medium: Social media
“I should have asked you to take off your shoes at the door—you know, Japanese style—and put your iPhone in your shoes! And turn it off, so it doesn’t ring. Someday maybe this’ll happen, but it’s not guaranteed to make someone like me very popular.”
V. Vale
more infosource: The Believer Logger, May 21, 2012
category: etiquette, socializing, technology
medium: Interview
via: Austin Kleon“I really don’t like adults at all.”
Maurice Sendak
more infosource: “Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Part 1,” The Colbert Report, January 24, 2012; watch here (well worth it)
category: adult, introvert, socializing
medium: Interview
“I like on the table,
when we’re speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.”
Pablo Neruda
more infosource: “Oda al Vino [Ode to Wine],” trans. Margaret Sayers Peden, in Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 167.
view on Google Books
category: alcohol, socializing, wine
medium: Poetry
via: Beverly Bader“Seating plans, in my opinion, are a form of social incarceration.”
Elizabeth McCracken
more infosource: The Giant’s House (New York: The Dial Press, 1996), 125.
buy on Amazon
category: socializing
medium: Fiction
“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.”
Emily Dickinson
more infosource: 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.
buy on Amazon
category: introvert, socializing
medium: Letter
“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 to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.”
Margaret Atwood
more infosource: The Edible Woman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999), 112.
view on Google Books
category: communication, confession, introvert, socializing, talk
medium: Fiction
“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
more infosource: “Tina Brown Is Still Hungry For Buzz,” by Peter Stevenson, The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2011.
category: dinner, love, marriage, socializing
medium: Magazine profile
“Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group—these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.”
David Brooks
more infosource: “Amy Chua Is a Wimp,” The New York Times, January 17, 2011.
category: adolescence, sleepover, socializing
medium: Op-Ed
“Exploration of my (apparently vital) need of solitude: and yet I have a (no less vital) need of my friends.
I must therefore: 1) force myself to ‘call’ them from time to time, find the energy to do so, combat my—telephonic (among other kinds)—apathy; 2) ask them to understand that above all they must let me call them. If they less often, less systematically, got in touch with me, that would mean for me that I must get in touch with them.”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated August 3, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 181.
buy on Amazon
category: friend, introvert, mourning, socializing, solitude
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“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.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
more infosource: Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 23.
buy on Amazon
view on Google Books
category: connection, socializing
medium: diary
notes: diary entry dated Saturday March 18, 1933
“I do think that socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.”
Aaron Sorkin
more infosource: The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, September 30, 2010.
watch video
category: Internet, reality, socializing, technology, television
medium: television interview
via: Elisa Zazzera“Sharing a beer on the porch is not something a New Orleanian must schedule two weeks in advance.”
Dan Baum
more infosource: “Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, How New Orleans Saved Its Soul,” The Washington Post, August 22, 2010.
category: beer, community, New Orleans, schedule, socializing
medium: Op-Ed
“He arrived, unfortunately, in time for lunch, and by the end of the meal, without really trying, he had succeeded in alienating everybody including the dogs. It was in its way quite a tour de force to be able to irritate and insult five people of such different character with such ease and, apparently, without even being aware of doing it, inside two hours of arrival at a new locale.”
Gerald Durrell
more info

socializing