#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

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

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

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form. ↗

— H.P. Lovecraft

#correspondence #letters #society #solitude #perception

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

— Jacques Barzun

#called #correspondence #could #long #long time