Eleanor Roosevelt loved to write

Eleanor loved to write in a way that is not natural for writers. She ripped off sentences like unspooling a thread. She wrote letters to all of her loved ones, not only because she loved us, but because she loved the pen racing across the paper. She loved the appearance of her thoughts in blue ink on white paper. She could have had a bake-off with Anthony Trollope and come in first, most of the time.

Amy Bloom, White Houses (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 175 (voice of a fictionalized Lorena Hickok)

FDR's charm and coldness

He was the greatest president of my lifetime and he was a son of a bitch every day. Hischarm and cheer blinded you, made you deaf to your own thoughts, until all you could do was nod and smile, while the frost came down, killing you where you stood. He broke hearts and ambitions across his knee like bits of kindling, and then he dusted off his hands and said, Who's for cocktails?

Amy Bloom, White Houses (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 146 (voice of a fictionalized Lorena Hickok)

It's hard to see how others are even harder up

I had my nose rubbed in my own racialism so often, and so hard, by meeting colored people who were so much worse off and had been hard done by for so much longer. Negro men and women, working from can to can't, surrounded by a sea of hungry, wide-eyed children and at least one rail-thin, night-dark old lady in the corner, sitting like a seer in her one dress, all knowing that their suffering registered less, that their dead weighed less, that there was less chance they could climb out of this terrible canyon, and fewer people to reach for them as they did. I finally had to give it up and it hurt me, I tell you, to understand that the Hickoks of Bowdle, South Dakota, with shoes from a dead girl to wear on school days only and oatmeal for dinner, were lucky people.

Amy Bloom, White Houses (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), p. 113 (voice of a fictionalized Lorena Hickok, sent to report on social conditions during the Great Depression)