610 Quotes About Letters

Dashes and disappointments are not canonical Scripture.

Every line, every word was -- in the hackneyed metaphor which their dear writer, were she here, would forbid -- a dagger to my heart. To know that Marianne was in town was -- in the same language -- a thunderbolt. -- Thunderbolts and daggers! -- what a reproof would she have given me! -- her taste, her opinions -- I believe they are better known to me than my own, -- and I am sure they are dearer.

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.

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).

In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound.

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.

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!

And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her—it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and MIllet and Breton—a light in the darkness, the brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung a large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room.

Letter make words. Words make stories. And stories can be changed with strong enough magic.