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“I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Part of it is just learning what makes me happier and doing more of it, and learning what makes me unhappier and doing less of it.”

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source: interview, The Happiness Project

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medium: interview

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source: interview, The Happiness Project

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medium: interview

“I use Pelikan black drawing ink, and the crow-quill pen nibs. And you stick them in a handle. They’re all getting harder to find, all these antique art instruments. The companies that have made them are dying off one by one. But I got lucky. One day about six or seven years ago, my daughter, Sophie, bought a box of old pen points at a flea market in France. She found a box of about a hundred drawing pen points, and they’re the best ones I’ve ever used. They last and last, everything about them is fine, the point, the tensile quality, even the metal, the glass. The metal was just better, back then. I’ve still got maybe fifty of those. I think they’ll probably last me the rest of my life.”

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source: “R. Crumb, The Art of Comics No. 1,” interviewed by Ted Widmer, in Issue 193 of The Paris Review, 2010.

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medium: Interview

“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”

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source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1 1931–1934 (New York: The Swallow Press, 1966), 73.

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medium: diary

“…I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.”

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source: “A Couple in Chicago,” interview by Mariana Cook, The New Yorker, January 19, 2009.

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medium: interview

notes: Interview originally conducted on May 26, 1996 by Mariana Cook, who visited the Obamas in Hyde Park as part of a photography project on couples in America.

“I’ve discovered that one’s ‘ideal editor’ changes as one ages. At 83, with one eye gone and a lot of my hearing, my ideal editor is a young woman, preferably a pretty one, who doesn’t necessarily know anything about prose but who is a good driver and willing to take me on long journeys in my car.”

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source: Letters of E. B. White, rev. edition edited by Martha White (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 664.

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medium: letter

notes: letter to Ms. Elsie Myers Stainton dated May 24, 1983

“It can take years to find the right art supplies.”

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“The healthiest food in the supermarket—the fresh produce—doesn’t boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have the budget or the packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”

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source: Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 19.

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medium: nonfiction

“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.”

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source: “Called Far and Wide to Touch Minds,” by Cara Buckley, The New York Times, January 22, 2010.

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medium: newspaper interview

“I always seem to be trying to do six or seven different poems at the same time and just hoping I can keep them all well-nurtured enough so that one of them will suddenly get strong enough to take over all by itself until it is done.”

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source: Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 77.

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medium: letter

notes: letter to Robert Lowell, dated Sunday, January 11, 1949

“It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.”

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source: “Dinner Parties,” in Home Cooking (New York: HarperPerennial, 2000) [reissued edition], 95.

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medium: nonfiction

“It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)”

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source: Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 45.

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medium: nonfiction

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

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source: Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), Introduction, xv.

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medium: nonfiction

“Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”

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source: Mostly Harmless (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 2000), 88.

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medium: fiction

“When I am composed I feel no need of affiliating myself with anybody. There is a lot of the cat in me, and cats are not joiners.”

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source: “Compost,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 159.

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medium: essay

notes: White wrote this essay in June 1940.

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