#correspondence

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

There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition... ↗

— Roger Cardinal

#intuition #perception #poetics #poetry #poets

I have been further enlightened by the conversation and correspondence of some illustrious Italians, whom I would gladly name, were I not afraid of exposing them to danger. ↗

— Edmond About

#been #conversation #correspondence #danger #enlightened

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

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

— Mary E. Pearson

#correspondence #picture #postcard #art

(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

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

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