“Someone asked me about the long marriage to Joe [Gousha, Powell’s recently deceased husband]—42 years—and I reflected that he was the only person in the world I found it always a kick to run into on the street.

“As for his death, this is a curious thing to say but after 42 years of life together—much of it precarious and crushing—we have been through worse disasters together, and I’m sure Joe would feel the same way about me.”

Dawn Powell, journal entry, March 8, 1962 (courtesy of Mrs. T)

“It is a mistake to suppose it is only the people who would like to be what they are not who are snobs.”

Henry James, “The Solution” (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

“He was the truest friend, and practiced in the best friend’s best response: ‘You bet.’”

David Mamet, “David Mamet on Ricky Jay, a Great Astonisher and ‘Truest Friend’” (New York Times, Nov. 28, 2018)

“The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart—over so many years, through so many cheap curtain-raisers. It is not destroyed even by all the arts and craftiness of the destroyers, having an essential simplicity that is everlasting and triumphant, at the end of confusion.”

E.B. White, “Comment” (The New Yorker, December 24. 1949)

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”

Henry James, Hawthorne

“History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.”

John Betjeman, First and Last Loves

“Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation.”

Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter” (trans. Jack D. Flam)