Letter Quotes
More Letter Quotes
I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice... Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.
thomas szasz— Preface to the Second Edition
After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
jean cocteau— On the journal of Franz Kafka; diary entry (7 June 1953); Past Tense: Diaries Vol. 2 (1988)
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter- writing.
george eliot— Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 8 June 1856. Collected in The George Eliot Letters, edited by G. S. Haight (1954), volume 2.
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better Knowledge, sent to where I met him, down the Lachlan, years ago. He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him, Just 'on spec', addressed as follows: 'Clancy, of the Overflow'. And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected, (And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar) 'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: 'Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are.'
Banjo (Andrew Barton) Paterson— 1895 'Clancy of the Overflow', first published in the Bulletin, collected in The Man from Snowy River and OtherVerses (1895).
The diocesan papers are full of stories about atrocities in China and the sufferings of the Church and I get a letter from Betty Chang from Tientsin about the communes and the full-employment, etc. When we see the migrant camps, and our factories in the fields, our system does not offer much.
dorothy day— 12 February 1959
When Henry Mulcahy, a middle-aged instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, Jocelyn, Pennsylvania, unfolded the President's letter and became aware of its contents, he gave a sudden sharp cry of impatience and irritation, as if such interruptions could positively be brooked no longer.
mary mccarthy— The Groves of Academe (1952) First lines
In either event he could only adhere to the letter of the law, but then for every yea in the law there was a nay, and it always boiled down to simple expediency. Like a psychiatric diagnosis, it could always be juggled around to fit anything you chose.
mark clifton— p. 79 (They'd Rather Be Right (1954))
He used to say that personal beauty was a better introduction than any letter; 18 but others say that it was Diogenes who gave this description of it, while Aristotle called beauty "the gift of God"; that Socrates called it "a short-lived tyranny"; Theophrastus , "a silent deceit"; Theocritus , "an ivory mischief"; Carneades , "a sovereignty which stood in need of no guards".
diogenes laërtius— The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 5: The Peripatetics, Aristotle, 9.
The delight of the Torah is ignited by an inner awareness. A man begins to sense the great tapestry of each letter and point. Every concept and content, every notion and idea, of every spiritual movement, of every vibration, intellectual and emotional, from the immediate and general to the distant and detailed, from matters lofty, spiritual, and ethical according to their outward profile, to matters practical, obligatory, seemingly frightening, and forceful, and at the same time complex and full of content and great mental exertion all together become known by a supernal holy awareness.
— XXVIII : The Inner Light of Torah in the Land of Israel, as translated by Rabbi Bezalel Naor, p. 208.
Dear Prue, If a servant I sent last night got to Hampton-court, you received 29 walnuts and a letter from me. I inclose the Gazette; and am, with all my soul, Your passionate lover, and faithful husband,
Gertrude Stein— RICH. STEELE 1708 Letter, 20 Sep (published1787).
It's one thing for a courier service transport letters and documents from one city to another at a cost that only big business can afford; but it's another thing to take a letter from an Indian boy studying at the University of Ottawa to his mother in Old Crow.
jean chrétien— Straight From The Heart, Chapter Four: "The Politics Of Business" (1985, pg. 92).
It was I who gave the title "J'accuse" to Zola's letter.
Georges Clemenceau— Letter (19 June 1902), in which he claims to have chosen the headline title for Émile Zola's famous open letter on the Dreyfus affair, as quoted in Clemenceau (1974) by D. R. Watson, and Brewer's Famous Quotations : 5000 Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (2006) by Nigel Rees
He used to say that personal beauty was a better introduction than any letter; 18 but others say that it was Diogenes who gave this description of it, while Aristotle called beauty "the gift of God"; that Socrates called it "a short-lived tyranny"; Theophrastus, "a silent deceit"; Theocritus, "an ivory mischief"; Carneades, "a sovereignty which stood in need of no guards".
diogenes laërtius— Aristotle, 9.
Richard Strauss on Schoenberg, written by Schoenberg himself: "Dear Sir, I regret that I am unable to accept your invitation to write something for Richard Strauss's fiftieth birthday. In a letter to Frau Mahler (in connection with Mahler Memorial Fund) Herr Strauss wrote about me as follows: "The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist ...". "I think he'd do better to shovel snow instead of scribbling on music-paper..."
arnold schoenberg— Schoenberg, letter to an unknown correspondent, Berlin, 22 April 1914.
"I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'"
david sedaris— Interview with Robert David Sullivan
A great friend of mine at the beginning of our friendship (he was himself a poet) said to me very defiantly, "I have to tell you that I loathe children's books." And I said to him, "Well, won't you just read this just for my sake?" And he said grumpily, "Oh, very well, send it to me." I did, and I got a letter back saying: "Why didn't you tell me? Mary Poppins with her cool green core of sex has me enthralled forever."
p. l. travers— Interview by Edwina Burness and Jerry Griswold, The Paris Review No. 86 (Winter 1982)
A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist — nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
— Letter to Corona Machemer (1975-06-11)
She ends her letter, characteristically, by picturing me and her other critics as indifferent to the suffering of women. But many feminists, including several who wrote or spoke to me about my review, regret her single-minded concentration on lurid sex. They think that though it has predictably attracted much publicity, it tends to stereotype women as victims, and takes attention from still urgent questions of economic, political, and professional equality.
ronald dworkin— "Pornography: An Exchange", response to Catharine MacKinnon, New York Review of Books 41(5), (3 March 1994)
Your letter firmed me up a lot. It certainly is a comfort to know that my work is respected by someone whom I respect and am as fond as you. It confirms my beliefe that life is notall nonsense and cruelty the inversion of Victorian complacency but has hard spots of sense and love bobbing about in it here and there.
e. m. forster— Letter 330, to Christopher Isherwood, 28 August 1938
A letter depends on how you read it, a melody on how you sing it.
isaac leib peretz— A Gilgul fun a Nign, 1901. Alle Verk, vi. 33.
Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. ... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.
george pólya— p. 148 (How to Solve It (1945))
Preferment goes by letter and affection.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603), Act I, scene 1, line 36.
The welcome news is in the letter found; The carrier's not commission'd to expound; It speaks itself, and what it does contain, In all things needful to be known, is plain.
john dryden— John Dryden, Religio Laici, line 366.
Thy letter sent to prove me, Inflicts no sense of wrong; No longer wilt thou love me, Thy letter, though, is long.
Heinrich Heine— Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs, New Spring, No. 34.
At this every lady drew up her mouth as if going to pronounce the letter P.
— Oliver Goldsmith, letter to Robert Bryanton. Sept., 1758
Not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
— II Corinthians, III. 6.
It is no small comfort that God hath written some Scriptures to you which He hath not to others. Read these, and think God is like a friend who sendeth a letter to a whole house and family, but who speaketh in His letter to some by name that are dearest to Him in the house.
— P. 270. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ring leader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq thus showing finally that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice Presidents Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.
— Ron Suskind, The Way of the World; p. 371 [about Bush]
