"(Joan,1941) She wrote me a letter asking,"How can I read it?,Its so hard." I told her to start at the beginning and read as far as you can get until you're lost. Then start again at the beginning and keep working through until you can understand the whole book. And thats what she did"
Letters quotes
Letters
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Letters quotes (page 4 of 36)
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"My knowledge of the letter of the Shastras is better, but of true religion they are able to give me but little."
"Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face"."
"A stiff letter galls one like a stiff shirt collar -- whilst a sheet garnished here and there with a careless blot -- and here and there a dash -- but in the main full of excellent matter, is like a clever fellow in a dirty shirt whom we value for the good humour he brings with him and not for the garb he wears."
"Every week we ought to have one hour for recieving letters, then go take a bath."
"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."
"Eating in a hurried or unconscious way, as so many of us have learned to do, is like receiving a love letter from the earth, but never taking the time to carefully read it."
"The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice."
"When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family."
"I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter."
"Grammar is the grave of letters."
"You don't really know a woman until she writes you a letter."
"[Hospitalized and pressing the nurse's button before dictating letters to her secretary:] This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy."
"In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans."
"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives."
"letters are not the first, but the last step in the progression from barbarism to civilisation."
"Retirement without the love of letters is a living burial."
"We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons."
"For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed 'S. Gollum'. That would have been more difficult to deal with."
"I'd rather sit down and write a letter than call someone up. I hate the telephone."