Letters Quotes - Page 39

• When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.

  David Sedaris

  Writing, Airports, Typewriters

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear.

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Soccer, Art, Writing

  Curtis Sittenfeld (2005). “Prep: a novel”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

  May Sarton

  Real, Heart, Animal

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.19, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My favorite six letter word is always because it promises so much. My favorite five letter word is never because it insists on contradicting the promise. My favorite four letter word is once because it says it happened then. My favorite three letter word is yes because I’m just now learning to say it to my heart. My favorite two letter word is if because it makes all things possible like this: If not always If not never Then once. Yes.

  Kate DiCamillo

  Heart, Two, Promise

  30 Copy quote

• How obvious it is now--the gift you gave him. All those letters, they were you... All those beautiful powerful words, they were you!.. The voice from the shadows, that was you... You always loved me!" Roxanne

  Edmond Rostand

  Beautiful, Powerful, Voice

  Edmond Rostand (1995). “Cyrano de Bergerac”, Talonbooks Limited

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Inside the envelope with the letter was a little Princess Leia action figure USB flash drive. For me to store my novel on, since he was right - I never back up my computer's hard drive. The sight of it - it's Princess Leia in her Hoth outfit, my favorite of her costumes (how had he remembered?) brought tears to my eyes.

  Meg Cabot

  Princess, Eye, Sight

  "Crowning Glory". Book by Meg Cabot, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.

  Jane Austen

  Mother, Morning, Children

  Jane Austen (2014). “Northanger Abbey (illustrated)”, p.90, Osmora Incorporated

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometimes I feel like I've been waiting for someone to tell me when I can be normal again,' she said. 'I keep thinking I'll get a letter. Or a call. When does it happen?' Pete looked like he wanted to walk toward her, but then he fell back against the car. The staring contest between them for almost a minute, and finally Pete exhaled loudly. It's okay,' he said.

  Maureen Johnson

  Thinking, Car, Waiting

  Maureen Johnson (2013). “The Key To The Golden Firebird”, p.219, Hot Key Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Then idiots talk....of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce!....But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I'll show you energy.

  Charles Dickens

  Opportunity, Energy, Deuces

  7 Copy quote

• And there was that letter from the Bramleys—that really made me feel good. You don’t find people like the Bramleys now; radio, television and the motorcar have carried the outside world into the most isolated places so that the simple people you used to meet on the lonely farms are rapidly becoming like people anywhere else. There are still a few left, of course—old folk who cling to the ways of their fathers and when I come across any of them I like to make some excuse to sit down and talk with them and listen to the old Yorkshire words and expressions which have almost disappeared.

  James Herriot

  Lonely, Father, Simple

  James Herriot (2012). “All Creatures Great and Small: The classic memoirs of a Yorkshire country vet”, p.313, Pan Macmillan

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.

  Philip Larkin

  Pain, Years, House

  Philip Larkin, “Why DID I Dream Of You Last Night?”

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. -- A love letter from Freud to his fiancée.

  Sigmund Freud

  Girl, Princess, Kissing

  Sigmund Freud (1975). “Cocaine papers”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

  Samuel Beckett

  Writing, Life Is, This Life

  "Love, styes and stools" by Nicholas Lezard, www.theguardian.com. March 20, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the Q letter into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

  Douglas Adams

  Stories, Moral, Should

  Douglas Adams (2017). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy in Four Parts”, p.281, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!

  Cornelia Funke

  Book, Order, Different

  6 Copy quote

• She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

  Cornelia Funke

  Children, Chocolate, Unhappy

  Cornelia Funke (2011). “Inkdeath”, p.114, Scholastic Inc.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Writing, Would Be, Stories

  11 Copy quote

• You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas

  Oscar Wilde

  Night, Thinking, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

  Cornelia Funke

  Book, Doe, Stories

  7 Copy quote

• Gee, You're so Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain Oh, Marcia, I want your long blonde beauty to be taught in high school, so kids will learn that God lives like music in the skin and sounds like a sunshine harpsicord. I want high school report cards to look like this: Playing with Gentle Glass Things A Computer Magic A Writing Letters to Those You Love A Finding out about Fish A Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty A+!

  Richard Brautigan

  Beautiful, Rain, Writing

  Richard Brautigan (1989). “Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar”, p.244, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised--fully extirpated--absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary!

  Mark Dunn

  Fall, Vocabulary, July

  4 Copy quote

• Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards.

  Rick Riordan

  Swimming, Riding, Pages

  Rick Riordan (2013). “Demigods and Monsters: Your Favorite Authors on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series”, p.26, BenBella Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I wake, a piece of sharp green glass on the floor is cutting into my hand and I know it's a sign. I etch a letter on my hand; put it on top so I can see the jagged edges bleeding out; S. S is for sorrow, for all I don't say. S is for sick now, my punishing ways.

  Ibi Kaslik

  Cutting, Glasses, Hands

  4 Copy quote

• I was secretly convinced that with such a marvel one would be able to write anything, from novels to encyclopedias, and letters whose supernatural power would surpass any postal limitations--a letter written with that pen would reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Mother, Father, Writing

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.40, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• THE NOTE said the first clue was "in the big one." I looked at the jumble of letters that followed, and I saw no pattern. Not such a surprise, since I was missing the puzzle chromosome and couldn't do puzzles designed for nine-year-olds.

  Janet Evanovich

  Years, Missing, Patterns

  Janet Evanovich (2007). “More Plums in One: Four to Score, High Five, and Hot Six”, p.25, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source