40 Quotes About Letter-writing

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.

(...) às vezes não se tem o que escrever mesmo quando se tem o que falar.

The nature of the epistolary genre was revealed to me: a form of writing devoted to another person. Novels, poems, and so on, were texts into which others were free to enter, or not. Letters, on the other hand, did not exist without the other person, and their very mission, their significance, was the epiphany of the recipient.

To write a letter is to send a message to the future; to speak of the present with an addressee who is not there, knowing nothing about how that person is (in what spirits, with whom) while we write and, above all, later: while reading over what we have written. Correspondence is the utopian form of conversation because it annihilates the present and turns the future into the only possible place for dialogue.

All my life I have written letters - to our mother, our relatives, a wide circle of friends and acquaintance, to my husband, to you. Correspondence has always been as necessary to my happiness as a well-cooked dinner, and I've found it more sustaining for its generosity: an act of charity that returned to me a hundredfold...

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

Can you think of anything worse than living in a small town like this [ Farmington, Connecticut] all your life and competing to see which housewife could bake the best cake?[Letter to R. Beverley Corbin, Jr.3 October 1946]

Every body allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.

Deres KHDeres KH menes Deres KH. Altsaa Knut Kongsberg. Deres Knut Kongsberg, Kongsbergknuten Deres, forstaar De.