Quotes About Letters

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

You can email me, but I prefer letters that come through conventional mail. I like letters that have been licked by strangers.

Alongside my "no email" policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

The 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.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

... letters freeze time for us, eternalizing shared experiences so we can go back and draw strength from them. Letters are like deposits in a secret bank that can be withdrawn when they are needed. And as we look back in love, we appreciate anew the thought and time that was taken to express those feelings.

There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

To 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.

I got three letters today telling me that I'm god. Why can't I pay the rent?

Doth not all nature around me praise God? If I were silent, I should be an exception to the universe. Doth not the thunder praise Him as it rolls like drums in the march of the God of armies? Do not the mountains praise Him when the woods upon their summits wave in adoration? Doth not the lightning write His name in letters of fire? Hath not the whole earth a voice? And shall I, can I, silent be?

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

Nigel gave the lamp a cautious buff and small smoking red letters appeared in the air. "Hi," Nigel read aloud, "Do not put down the lamp because your custom is important to us. Please leave a wish after the tone and, very shortly, it will be our command. In the meantime, have a nice eternity."

On all the walls, wherever walls exist, I will inscribe this eternal indictment of Christianity--I have letters to make even blindmen see.... I call Christianity the single great curse, the single great innermost depravity, the single great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, secretive, subterranean, small enough--I call it mankind's single immortal blemish.... And we reckon time from the dies nefastus with which this calamity arose--following Christianity's first day!--Why not following its last day, instead?--Following today?--Transvaluation of all values!

But it's far too late for us; ring, hair, letters, photographs - all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram.

Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you 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.

Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.

I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind.

Since I was 20 years old, I've been a kind of corporation. I'd wake up in the morning and my job was to be 'Bonnie Raitt' in capital letters.

What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart.

If 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.

I plan to rearrange the alphabetical order because i think it has a very big error on the parts of the sequence of some letters. For example, I have just discovered that U and I should be together.

For me the process works best with no interruptions, no breaks in the steady application, no letters to be answered, very little social life, no holidays; it is therefore a form of happy imprisonment.

Over the last couple of years I have gotten an average of 2,000 letters a week from fans.

When I receive letters from girls that say, 'You give me confidence,' I think, 'Wow, this is amazing.' That's my goal: to let people know it's truly what's on the inside that counts.

He 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.

Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.

As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

I, myself, was always recognized . . . as the “slow one” in the family. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was . . . an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day.

I love books, letters and texts visually as objects, and textually, for their content. The same book I write serves a different purpose when included in an exhibition of mine than when read on its own, outside of it.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

Always write angry letters to your enemies. Never mail them.

I never really got over the fun of making letters.

Over the last two years, I have been able to comb through The Prince's archives. I have been free to read his journals, diaries and many thousands of the letters.

The FBI is urging all Americans to beware of any letters or packages that have badly misspelled words. Man, this is going to be terrible news for the rap industry.

There is snobbery in the idea that the modern cult of celebrity has not touched the lofty realm of letters. We are like visitors to a garden or flower show who wander the pathways and do not notice the beautiful flora but instead exchange murmurs about the appearance of the soil.

I don't know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn't get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.

The only way you can control people is to lie to them. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

Without the letters of condolence, telegrams of congratulations and even occasional postcards, the friendship of a separated friend is not a social reality. It has no existence without the rites of friendship. Social rituals create a reality which would be nothing without them.

I don't write polite letters. I don't like to plea-bargain. I like to fight.

I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.

I want a real take-home quality to the sermon, so I built the whole sermon series around the word grace, those five letters.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

Love letters are supposed to be private. [Eva Braun] was very secretive about all that.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

THE NOTE said the first clue was "in the big one." I looked at the jumble of letters that followed, and I saw no pattern. Not such a surprise, since I was missing the puzzle chromosome and couldn't do puzzles designed for nine-year-olds.

All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.