Letters Quotes

dear today, i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone.

Write like you speak with the 'rhythms of human speech,' as William Zinsser said, and in as few words as possible. Use action verbs to carry water.

If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.

I only wrote prose before I met you. My musings were superfluous and serious as well. But now the words dance with me. I sing with them and we create poetry.

Every line, every word was -- in the hackneyed metaphor which their dear writer, were she here, would forbid -- a dagger to my heart. To know that Marianne was in town was -- in the same language -- a thunderbolt. -- Thunderbolts and daggers! -- what a reproof would she have given me! -- her taste, her opinions -- I believe they are better known to me than my own, -- and I am sure they are dearer.

I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as ons is forced to think.

The future is not in the hands of fate, but in ours.

If I never see you again I will always carry youinsideoutsideon my fingertipsand at brain edgesand in centerscentersof what I am ofwhat remains.

This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom.

Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable

Intelligence reports and local folklore together perpetuated tales of his bloody adventures across the rim worlds and badlands of Terran space. It was his trademark and often over the last two decades, history proclaimed in large bloody letters that ‘Kilroy woz ‘ere.

Into each dance must be packed the panic and ecstasy of her last moment of life, for underneath was death.

Are you keeping up your good studies at school and working as hard as you always did?

[Letter to William Ward, 11 July 1878]Dear Boy, Why don’t you write to me? I don’t know what has become of you.As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me.However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come? YoursOscar

My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter—the impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox. It seemed suddenly horrible that one's words could not be taken back, one's thoughts allowed none of the remediation of speaking face to face.

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it sho

Let your heart dance with pen and paperNow fill the paper with dancing letters.

I came up with a pen and tablet hoping to write an immortal short story, but I've been having a dreadful time with my heroine— I CAN'T make her behave as I want her to behave; so I've abandoned her for the moment, and am writing to you.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

I really should be studying now, but you're much more important to me than a .50 calibre machine gun.

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

A poetess is not as selfishas you assume.After months of agonising over her marriage of words—the bride—and spaces—the groom,she knows that as soonas she has penned the poem,it’s yours to consume.So, without giving it a think,she blows on the inkand the letters fly awaylike dandelions on a windy day,landing on hands and lips, on hearts and hips.But more often than not,you can easily spotthem trodden and forgotten,becoming sodden and rotten.Yet, she will continue to makewhat’s others to takebecause selfishness is not the mark of a poetess.

I am in no mood to fulminate on paper--I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.

Don't you believe I love you? Don't know how I can make you believe. I didn't want to kiss you goodbye--that was the trouble--I wanted to kiss you goodnight. […] Of course I love you. I love you all the time. […] I'd like to hold you and kiss you so that you wouldn't doubt whether I wanted to or not.

A real love letter is made of insight, understanding, and compassion. Otherwise it's not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in the world. But before it produces a transformation in the other person, it has to produce a transformation within us. Some letters may take the whole of our lifetime to write.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

Innocence is the beginning of ignorance. Experience is the end of stupidity.