Popular quotes about Letters! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 24
Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.
Jane CampionI will be gone from here and sing my songs/ In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are,/ And carve in letters on the little trees/ The story of my love, and as the trees/ Will grow letters too will grow, to cry/ In a louder voice the story of my love.
VirgilWe took a right at the fork, heading farther north. The charred houses continued. To the right, a large sign nailed to an old telephone post shouted DANGER in huge red letters. Underneath in crisp black letters was written: IM-1: Infectious Magic Area Do Not Enter Authorized Personnel Only A second smaller sign under the first one, written on a piece of plastic with permanent marker, read: Keep out, stupid. โWe arenโt going to keep out, are we?โ Ascanio asked. โNo.โ โAwesome.
Ilona AndrewsI have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily.
Laurence HousmanIt took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being. Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO. The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile. What a scamp.
Jeff LindsayI had a fan who had a fictional relationship with me. She wrote letters to me and then wrote return letters to herself (from me). In her mind, we were married and had two children. Her parents finally uncovered this delusional life she was living and she got help.
Matthew McConaugheyLetters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires.
Elizabeth HardwickAt the end, [Eva Braun] begged me to spare these letters [to Adolf Hitler] and bury them. She specifically wrote to me and told me over the phone not to read any of the letters, she made me promise.
Gretl BraunThe Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.
Edward GibbonStrangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?
Dean KoontzLetters do love one another. However, due to their anatomical differences, some letters have a hard time achieving intimacy.
Ellen LuptonI had never thought of myself as a dramatist, and, for really good technical results, the thought came too late: a man of letters has become too wordy to write economically for the stage.
Laurence HousmanThe worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.
John GrishamTo love very much is to love inadequately; we love-that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters.
Guy de MaupassantI mean I appreciate fan mail and that the people like what I am doing but I can't answer it. If I would answer 25 letters a day I would be just a guy answering mail and not an artist anymore.
Henry RollinsThe age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes--I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century.
Francois RabelaisI was sorting through my mother's things. All the letters from friends had to go. I don't know why she kept them, and now they meant nothing to anybody alive. Each generation flushes the toilet for the last.
Lucy EllmannThe King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing.
Jared DiamondLove After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek WalcottThey are more like artistic names. Bรก is a nickname. It's short for Gรก. When I learned to spell letters and words, instead of calling him Gabriel [Ba], I called him Babio. People call him Gรก and I call him Bรก. So Bรก is a nickname.
Gabriel BaScared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation.
Alan CohenThe nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous โ tedium.
Dorothy ParkerI have done quite a few signings at bookstores, libraries and conferences. I have received phone calls and letters from people who liked the book.
Kate DiCamilloMr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was โa way out of loneliness.โ (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
Jonathan Franzenclosed my eyes and listened. It was like music I'd heard all my life, even more than "This Lullaby." All those keystrokes, all those letters, so many words. I brushed my fingers over the beads and watched as her image rippled, like it was on water, breaking apart gently and shimmering before becoming whole again.
Sarah DessenWhen we did 'Dynasty', it was the clothes. I think the clothes affected every woman around the world. I got so many letters, I think we made the designer a millionaire!
Aaron SpellingIf the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.
HeloiseThe flaw is the business plan - digging up and burning way more carbon than physics says we can deal with. So, I suppose it's some kind of mid-point between writing them nice letters asking them to stop and figuring out a way to take down the entire system- which I don't have any idea how to do.
Bill McKibbenWhy should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass; I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.
Walt WhitmanHe read the letter again, but could not take in any more meaning than he had done the first time and was reduced to staring at the handwriting itself. She had made her g's the same way he did : he searched through the letter for every one of them, and each felt like a friendly little wave glimpsed from behind a veil. The letter was an incredible treasure, proof that Lily Potter had lived, really lived, that her warm hand had once moved across this parchment, tracing ink into these letters, these words, words about him, Harry, her son.
J. K. RowlingI am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.
Robert BoyleIn my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence, but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.
John SteinbeckI teach art at a famous art school, and yet I don't have really the least notion what post-modernism means, but we have people in the letters and science department that understand it quite well and the students go there if they want to understand what this term that is being bandied about is all about, but I've never understood it.
Lawrence JordanTo live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.
Edna O'BrienWrite: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.
Ken BurnsLetters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.
Lord Chesterfield'Particularly' is particularly difficult because the 'L' and the 'R' are totally different, like totally different letters. I would spend hours in front of the mirror with my dialect coach to observe my tongue. You don't think, when you speak, about all the things that happen in your jaw and your mouth, how everything reacts, so you have to watch all those things and realise we have a totally different use of our tongue and jaws.
Marion CotillardIt's just a combination of letters I liked. And when your whole art's based on the lettering you choose, you kinda figure out what ones work together. I just liked the shapes of the k, a, w, s. It has no meaning.
KAWSWhat I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
Sylvia Plath