Correspondence Quotes

“Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

(Letter 16, 1657)”
― Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

“The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.”
― Mary E. Pearson, The Miles Between

“open me carefully”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters.”
― Lewis Carroll

“An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.”
― Saul Bellow

“To write is human, to receive a letter: Divine!”
― Susan Lendroth

“The problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.”
― Saul Bellow

“I was very pleased with your kind letter. Until now I never dreamed of being something like a hero. But since you've given me the nomination I feel that I am one.”
― Albert Einstein, Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein's Letters to and from Children

“We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.”
― Johann Goethe, Elective Affinities

“There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...”
― Roger Cardinal, Figures of Reality

“Whatever you choose for your stationery is your favorite color because it's where you pour your heart out.”
― Mary E. Pearson, The Miles Between

“where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside.”
― Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer

“I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person ― some stranger ― had gone to the trouble of marking my name on this envelope.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“(Quoting Goethe:)

"We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.”
― James Howe, The Watcher

“I don't have to point out, I'm sure, that letters received should be answered within a reasonable time- say a month; but there is such a thing as answering too promptly and writing too long a letter. It makes answering a burden to your correspondent, who will feel obligated to do at least as well as you have done, and will soon be heartily sick of the whole thing.”
― Louise Dickinson Rich, We Took to the Woods

“Letters always frustrate me with what's left out.”
― Eileen Drew, Blue Taxis: Stories about Africa

“He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Dear Edward has given Fanny a chocolate-coloured coach with pale blue cushions. The wheat is picked out in blue." He held the sheet at arm's length. "It seems strange, but no doubt Fanny is right. I have not been in England for such a time...Ah, I beg her pardon. You will be relieved to hear, my dear Hugh, that the wheat still grows as it ever did. The wheels are picked out in blue.”
― Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades

“A correspondence is a kind of love affair.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“Fiona Apple's album made me more immediately depressed than any other music I remembered hearing.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“North Brooklin, Maine

30 March 1973

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man's curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,
[Signed, 'E. B. White']”
― E.B. White

“This tedious letter to you . . .
what is one life to another?”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“...if there be some points which correspondence can never settle, but which can be made clear by conversation in two minutes, at other times just the opposite is the case: an objection clearly stated in writing, a doubt well expressed, which elicits a direct and positive reply, helps things along more than ten hours of oral intercourse!”
― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?

“It is a pleasant reflexion that friends who are too far separated for personal intercourse, have the means of communicating thoughts & feelings by pen and paper.' --ELIZABETH CARRINGTON MORRIS, Letter to Ann Haines, June 3, 1840.”
― Catherine McNeur, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science

“Time is on my side, already written there across the first helmet I ever wore there. And underneath it, in smaller letting that read more like a whispered prayer than an assertion, No lie, GI. The rear-hatch gunner on a Chinook threw it to me that first morning at the Kontum airstrip, a few hours after the Dak To fighting had ended, screaming at me through the rotor wind, "You keep that, we got plenty, good luck!" and then flying off. I was so glad to have the equipment that I didn't stop to think where it had to have come from. The sweatband inside was seasoned up black and greasy, it was more alive now than the man who'd worn it, when I got rid of it ten minutes later I didn't just leave it on the ground, I snuck away from it furtive and ashamed, afraid that someone would see it and call after me, "Hey numnuts, you forgot something...”
― Michael Herr, Dispatches

“Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over diesel fuel, mildew, garbage, excrement, atmosphere. A five-block walk in that could take it out of you, you'd get back to the hotel with your head feeling like one of those chocolate apples, tap it sharply in the right spot and it falls apart in sections.
​”
― Michael Herr, Dispatches