Letters Quotes - Page 4

• 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

  Writing, Done, Way

  Ernest Hemingway (1981). “Selected Letters, 1917-1961”

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• You don't carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.

  Charles Dickens

  Integrity, Ethics, Recommendations

  Charles Dickens (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)”, p.2441, Delphi Classics

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• There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

  John Steinbeck

  Kindness, Selfish, Mean

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• All the plots of hell and commotions on earth have not so much as shaken God's hand to spoil one letter or line he has been drawing.

  William Gurnall

  Hands, Drawing, Plot

  William Gurnall (1994). “The Christian in Complete Armour: Daily Readings in Spiritual Warfare”, p.117, Moody Publishers

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• Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Girl, Writing, Hunting

  Ernest Hemingway, Nick Lyons, Jack Hemingway (2012). “Hemingway on Fishing”, p.96, Simon and Schuster

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• I love things made out of animals. 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

  Funny, Animal, Thinking

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• Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

  Alvin Toffler

  Writing, Errors, Editors

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• Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

  Voltaire

  Giving, Woe, Spirit

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• Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.

  Mark Helprin

  Editors, People, World

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• Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.

  Johann Georg Hamann

  Book, Philosophical, Want

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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

  Ignorance, Past, House

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• I wrote my friend a letter using a highlighting pen. But he could not read it, he thought I was trying to show him certain parts of a piece of paper.

  Mitch Hedberg

  Funny, Humor, Trying

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• We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out discretion, and so disappears the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Life, Lasts, Disappear

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1868). “Novels and Tales by Goethe”, p.181

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

  Emily Dickinson

  Friendship, Mind, Immortality

  "The Letters of Emily Dickinson". Book edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, 1894.

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• My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

  A. A. Milne

  Writing, English Grammar, Spelling

  Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) ch. 6

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• The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

  Blaise Pascal

  Long, Leisure, Brevity

  Blaise Pascal (1850). “The Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal”, p.339

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• I have proved by actual trial that a letter, that takes an hour to write, takes only about 3 minutes to read!

  Lewis Carroll

  Writing, Trials, Hours

  Lewis Carroll, Roger Lancelyn Green (1989). “The Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll”, p.11, Springer

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• When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

  Edith Wharton

  Long, People, Half

  Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.3200, Delphi Classics

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• If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Mirrors, Rooms, Old Love

  Mignon McLaughlin (2014). “Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin”, p.54, BookBaby

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• Ah, you're the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then.

  Prince Philip

  Writing, Classic

  "Schoolboy refutes Sun's Prince Philip gaffe claim" by Patrick Barrett, www.theguardian.com. March 7, 2003.

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• No arts, no letters - no society.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Art

  Leviathan pt. 1, ch. 13 (1651)

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• 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

  Inspirational, Communication, Mean

  Elizabeth Hardwick (2017). “The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick”, p.27, New York Review of Books

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• I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

  Blaise Pascal

  Time, Learning, Usual

  Lettres Provinciales no. 16 (1657) See Thoreau 34; WoodrowWilson 25

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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

  Two, Personality, Tests

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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

  Wine, Men, Sound

  Samuel Butler (1951). “Notebooks: Selections Edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill”

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