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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
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Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
-Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler, 1912
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Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Politeness is as much concerned in answering letters within a reasonable time, as it is in returning a bow, immediately.
-Lord Chesterfield
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A Letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the Mind alone, without corporeal friend?
-Emily Dickinson
letter to James D. Clark
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SIR, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For thus, friends absent speak.
-John Donne
To Sir Henry Wotton, 1598
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How frail and ephemeral is the material substance of letters, which makes their very survival so hazardous. Print has a permanence of its own, though it may not be much worth preserving, but a letter! Conveyed by uncertain transportation, over which the sender has no control; committed to a single individual who may be careless or inappreciative; left to the mercy of future generations, of families maybe anxious to suppress the past, of the accidents of removals and house-cleanings, or of mere ignorance. How often it has been by the veriest chance that they have survived at all.
-Elizabeth Drew
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A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
-Lawrence Durrell
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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
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Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
-E. M. Forster
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, ch. 14, 1934
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Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.
-Johann von Goethe
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Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.
-Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
A Woman of Independent Means
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Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them, we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. 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 conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires...
-Elizabeth Hardwick
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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
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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
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A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation -- a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.
-Samuel Johnson
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I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one!
-Sir John A. Macdonald
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It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
-Henry Miller
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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
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I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
-Blaise Pascal
Lettres provinciales, letter 16, 1657
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Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.
-Sydney Smith
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I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.
-Henry David Thoreau
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)
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Letters to absence can a voice impart,
And lend a tongue when distance gags the heart.
-Horace Walpole
Horace Walpole
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Books about Letters (writing)
