#letters

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being. ↗

— James G. Frazer

#apt #being #complex #consideration #his

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#love #war #love

A real love letter is made of insight, understanding, and compassion. Otherwise it's not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in the world. But before it produces a transformation in the other person, it has to produce a transformation within us. Some letters may take the whole of our lifetime to write. ↗

— Thích Nhất Hạnh

#letters #love #love-letters #love

Y, sin embargo, mentiría si dijera que la extraño. Es el hechizo más perfecto y más doloroso. Usted está aquí, igual que yo y con mayor intensidad aún; allí donde yo estoy, está usted, como yo y más intensamente aún. No bromeo. A veces imagino que usted -que está aquí- extraña mi presencia y pregunta: "¿Pero dónde está? ¿Acaso no escribía diciendo que estaba en Merano? [...] El día es tan corto. Transcurre y termina con usted y fuera de usted sólo hay unas pocas nimiedades. Apenas me queda un rato para escribirle a la verdadera Milena, porque la Milena más verdadera aún ha estado aquí todo el día, en la habitación, en el balcón, en las nubes. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#spanish #spanish

He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter--the impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox. It seemed suddenly horrible that one's words could not be taken back, one's thoughts allowed none of the remediation of speaking face to face. ↗

— Helen Simonson

#letters #imagination

When your defenses are down, it's alarming and beautiful - all that strength contained in a glass jar of innocence." He swallowed. "I've loved you since the moment you realized the astronomical odds of us meeting like that, because in that brief second, I watched you suddenly open your heart to the possibility of something magical happening - something unexpected. ↗

— Lynda Meyers

#letters-from-the-ledge #lftl #lynda-meyers #nate #quotes-of-life

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter." (Letter 16, 1657) ↗

— Blaise Pascal

#conciseness #correspondence #humor #letters #pithy

Now everybody who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business letter does not deserve the paper on which it is written unless it contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in the night to remember and think about. ↗

— Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

#writing #business

I really should be studying now, but you're much more important to me than a .50 calibre machine gun. ↗

— Kara Martinelli

#humor #letters #longing #love #wwii-history

Yetkin, ama acı veren bir büyü ile buradasınız! Benim burada olduğum gibi, daha da elle tutulur biçimde; ben neredeysem siz de oradasınız, benim olduğum kadar, daha da belirli. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#letters #letters-to-milena #love #milena #love