#correspondence

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

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

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

I was very pleased with your kind letter. Until now I never dreamed of being something like a hero. But since you've given me the nomination I feel that I am one. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#children #compliment #correspondence #hero #heroic

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

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence. ↗

— Jacques Barzun

#called #correspondence #could #long #long time

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

I write every day when I'm at home - trying to catch up with correspondence. ↗

— Colin Dexter

#correspondence #day #every #every day #home

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#death #friendship #humanity #procrastination #weaknesses

(Quoting Goethe:) "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. ↗

— James Howe

#letters #memory #beauty