Letters Quotes

And in this moment of pale dawn in the hours before we leave California, I finally realize what has been the hardest thing for me about Matt’s death. It isn’t that I lost a brother, like Frankie, or a son, like Aunt Jayne and Uncle Red. The hardest thing is that I’ll never know exactly what I lost, how much it should hurt, how long I should keep thinking about him. He took that mystery with him when he died, and a hundred thousand one-sided letters in my journal wouldn’t have brought me any closer to the truth than I was the night I pressed my fingers to the sea glass he wore around his neck and kissed him back. For over a year, the letters were my only connection to him; the only evidence that I didn’t imagine our brief time as other. When I first saw my journal helplessly floating on the waves, I felt a loss so immediate and overwhelming it was like being back in the hospital lobby when the doctor told us they couldn’t fix him. One minute, the journal was in my hands, soft and familiar and real; the next minute, it was gone. Just like Matt. And just like Matt, I need to let it go.

~ Sarah Ockler

A love letter lost in the mail, forgotten, miss delivered and then discovered years later and received by the intended is romantic. A love letter ending up in someone's spam filter is just annoying.

~ B.j. Neblett

She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too Polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.

~ Jane Austen

Postman’s bag is always heavy because it carries the life itself: It carries all the sorrows and all the joys, all the worries and all the hopes!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Eleven pages— this is a letter! Have courage. I'm going to stop.

~ Jean Webster

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.

~ Jean Webster

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.

~ Ernest Hemingway

My dearest Mary,Both my words and my conduct at our last meeting were ungentlemanly - born of haste and high emotion, rather than friendship and good judgement - and yet I cannot find it within me to apologize. I am glad I kissed you; glad to have revelled in your scent, your taste, the touch of your hands; glad, even, to have quarrelled with you because during those moments of anger, I was in your presence.Mary, you are the most singular woman I know: intelligent, brave and honest, and I crave your friendship. I confess to only the haziest notion of what I ask, having never been friends with a woman before. My friendships are male and conventional; pleasant and without distinction. But a friendship with you would be a bright, new, rare thing - if you would do me the honour.I expect that what I ask is impossible. But it is sweet to dream, Mary, and thus I tender one last, insolent, unapologetic request: write to me only if you can say yes.Yours,James

~ Y.s. Lee

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

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

I’ve wanted everything in my life to change for so long, and when it’s finally about to, my urge to escape slows down. I think that’s why people stay unhappy for so long, you know? Miserable or not, it’s easier to stick with what’s familiar. Do you notice that, too? How all of us just want to get through life as quickly and as easily as possible? And even though we know that without risk there’s no reward, we’re still so scared to chance it?

~ Penelope Douglas

If you do not want to write, at least spit on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and send it to me. You are not taking any notice of me at all. God forgive you – all I wanted was a few words from you.

~ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

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

~ Kara Martinelli

To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest..

~ H.p. Lovecraft

...How I adore you and want you. You can't know how much...I love belonging to you-- I glory in it, that you alone have bent me to your will, shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, and made me yours, so that away from you I am nothing but a useless puppet, an empty husk.

~ Violet Trefusis

Nothing and no one in the world could kill the love I have for you. I have surrendered my whole individuality, the very essence of my being to you. I have given you my body time after time to treat as you pleased. All the hoardings of my imagination I have laid bare to you. There isn't a recess in my brain into which you haven't penetrated. I have clung to you and caressed you and slept with you and I would like to tell the whole world that I clamour for you. You are my lover and I am your mistress, and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination-- the most powerful in the world.

~ Violet Trefusis

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

Some people write letters, in the library.

~ Margaret Atwood

Dashes and disappointments are not canonical Scripture.

~ Samuel Rutherford

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

~ Sara Sheridan

Would you please do me the honor of telling me WHAT THE BLAZES IS GOING ON?

~ Kristin Cashore

I’m bored to death. Perhaps I should pillage one of my neighbors for my own amusement. It seems to work for Drowden.

~ Kristin Cashore

King Drowden has given his men instructions to infiltrate the town, bribe townspeople for the secrets of their neighbors, steal the neighbors’ hidden treasures. Much more subtle than Drowden’s usual smash and burn technique. We do hope Drowden isn’t growing a brain.

~ Kristin Cashore

it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing.

~ Oscar Wilde

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.

~ Elizabeth Kostova

How are you going do your writings? How can the others understand you through words describing places, sensations, thoughts, feelings, hope, love, separations on a maze of phrases and paragraphs cemented with your ability to 'knit' your story? Maybe, 'how' is more relevant to provide for your readers a consistent path to build a story from the beginning to the end than 'what' and 'why'. Of course, you are not going to dismiss them. These ones – 'what' and 'why' –, they are pretty damn good too.

~ Frederick Vanderbuilt

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

~ Blaise Pascal

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).

~ Christopher Hitchens

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.

~ Helen Simonson

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

~ Sara Sheridan

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

~ John Donne