Quotations about Letters

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart. ~Phyllis Theroux


Never write a letter while you are angry. ~Chinese Proverb


It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence. ~Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine, 1954


I am tired, Beloved,
of chafing my heart against
the want of you;
of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
~Amy Lowell, "The Letter"


Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company. ~Lord Byron


What a wonderful thing is the mail, capable of conveying across continents a warm human hand-clasp. ~Author Unknown


It takes two to write a letter as much as it takes two to make a quarrel. ~Elizabeth Drew


And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
~W.H. Auden


The best time to frame an answer to the letters of a friend, is the moment you receive them. Then the warmth of friendship, and the intelligence received, most forcibly cooperate. ~William Shenstone


What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call. ~Liz Carpenter


Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; for, thus friends absent speak. ~John Donne


Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something. ~Ernest Hemingway


A strange volume of real life in the daily packet of the postman. Eternal love and instant payment! ~Douglas Jerrold, The Postman's Budget


If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The one good thing about not seeing you is that I can write you letters. ~Svetlana Alliluyeva


We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up. ~Sydney Smith


I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden


A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. ~Emily Dickinson


I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new. ~Sigmund Freud


The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u. ~Anna Quindlen


A woman seldom writes her Mind, but in her Postscript. ~Richard Steele, Spectator


When a man sends you an impudent letter, sit right down and give it back to him with interest ten times compounded, and then throw both letters in the wastebasket. ~Elbert Hubbard


The talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. ~Henry Tilney


Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Grammar is the grave of letters. ~Elbert Hubbard


When he wrote a letter, he would put that which was most material in the postscript, as if it had been a by-matter. ~Francis Bacon, "Of Cunning," Essays


Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires... ~Elizabeth Hardwick


Then there's the joy of getting your desk clean, and knowing that all your letters are answered, and you can see the wood on it again. ~Lady Bird Johnson


In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the passing, we have arrived. ~Knut Hamsun


A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying. ~Lawrence Durrell


Friends will write me letters. They run out of room on the front of the letter. They write "over" on the bottom of the letter. Like I'm that much of a moron. Like I need that there. Because if it wasn't there, I'd get to the bottom of the page: "And so Kathy and I went shopping and we..." That's the craziest thing! I don't know why she would just end it that way. ~Ellen DeGeneres


One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer. ~Lord Byron


There must be millions of people all over the world who never get any love letters... I could be their leader. ~Charlie Brown


In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives. ~Samuel Johnson


The post office has a great charm at one point of our lives. When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for. ~Jane Austen


My songs are just little letters to me. ~Ani Difranco


Chain letters are the postal equivalent of intestinal flu: you get it and pass it along to your friends. ~Bob Garfield


A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely. ~Pam Brown


If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing. ~Edward Bulwer Lytton


A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one! ~John A. MacDonald


I wonder if Eve could write letters in Paradise! But, poor Eve, she had no one to write to - no one to whom to tell what Eden was, no beloved child to whom her love traveled through any or all space. Poor Eve! ~Catharine M. Sedgwick


I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter. ~D.H. Lawrence


I sometimes think one of the great blessings we shall enjoy in heaven, will be to receive letters by every post and never be obliged to reply to them. ~Washington Irving


A Letter is a Joy of Earth -
It is denied the Gods
~Emily Dickinson, 1885


His sayings are generally like women's letters; all the pith is in the postscript. ~William Hazlitt


O ay, letters - I had letters - I am persecuted with letters - I hate letters - nobody knows how to write letters; and yet one has 'em, one does not know why - they serve one to pin up one's hair. ~William Congreve, The Way of the World, spoken by the character Mrs Millamant


Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies."
Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."
~William Congreve, The Way of the World


In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name. And I leave them where they are, for I know that wherever I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever. ~Walt Whitman


Politeness is as much concerned in answering letters within a reasonable time, as it is in returning a bow, immediately. ~Lord Chesterfield


The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. ~Walt Whitman


In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives. ~Anatole Broyard


To acknowledge the receipt of letters is always proper, to remove doubts of their miscarriage. ~George Washington