Maira Slackman

“All right,” I said, and wrote in my notebook, Abe Lincoln type. I didn’t have to remind myself about that. I just wrote because I had got in the habit. You can build up an awful lot of habits in six years, and you can fill an awful lot of little black books in that time and put them in a safety-deposit box when they get full because they aren’t something to leave around and because they would be worth their weight in gold to some parties to get their hands on. Not that they ever got their hands on them. A man’s got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backward and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books. The little black books lie up there in the safety-deposit box, and there are your works of days and hands all cozy in the dark in the little box and the world’s great axis grinds.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men