Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.

~ Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West Correspondence Love Writers

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

Saul Bellow Correspondence Death Friendship Humanity Procrastination Weaknesses

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.

~ Mary E. Pearson

Mary E. Pearson Art Correspondence Picture Postcard

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

Albert Einstein Admiration Children Compliment Correspondence Hero Heroic Letter

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

H.p. Lovecraft Belief Correspondence Letters Society Solitude

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.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle Boredom Correspondence Dinners Dishonesty Invitations Letters Lies Parties Pretense Sherlock Holmes Social Gatherings Society White Lies

...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.

~ George Lakoff

George Lakoff Conceptualization Correspondence Embodied Mind Embodied Realism Meaning Metaphor Objectivity Reason Truth

To write is human, to receive a letter: Devine!

~ Susan Lendroth

Susan Lendroth Author Correspondence Letter Writing Letters Mail Writer

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

Saul Bellow Communications Correspondence Letters Loners Solitude

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

Roger Cardinal Correspondence Intuition Perception Poetics Poetry Poets Romanticism Symbolism

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.

~ Carlene Bauer

Carlene Bauer Conversations Correspondence Epistolary Glaciers January Letters Soul Mates Winter

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

~ Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal Brevity Conciseness Correspondence Humor Letters Pithy Wit Writing