#correspondence

I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#correspondence #letters #loners #solitude #communication

Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this. ↗

— Vita Sackville-West

#love #writers #love

where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside. ↗

— Edward Gorey

#letter-art #letter-writing #letters #art

There is a much more exact correspondence between the natural and moral world than we are apt to take notice of. ↗

— Joseph Butler

#between #correspondence #exact #moral #more

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

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#letters #beauty

Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I started to read mathematics and science back in the mid-70s I found an unexpected lyricism in the necessarily precise language that scientists tend to use My instinct, my superstition is that the closer I see a thing and the more accurately I describe it, the better my chances of arriving at a certain sensuality of expression. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#science

We would never comment on private correspondence. ↗

— Prince Charles

#correspondence #never #private #would

Conditions were so hard. To send the news out, telex was the only means, but telex was very rare in Africa. So if somebody was flying to Europe, we gave him correspondence to send after he arrived. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#after #arrived #conditions #correspondence #europe

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it. ↗

— Mary E. Pearson

#correspondence #picture #postcard #art

It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person ― some stranger ― had gone to the trouble of marking my name on this envelope. ↗

— Diane Setterfield

#letters #business