"I have tried to be a [wo]man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it."
— Cornel West

"To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest.."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap?"
— Jack Spicer

"Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
"
— Jack Spicer

"Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow."
— Alice Steinbach (Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman)

"To send a letter is a good way to move somewhere without moving anything but your heart."
— Phyllis Theroux

"It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what you would expect--a middle-of-the-road course. We think the Americans edit too heavily and interfere with the author's rights. We think that the English publishers don't take enough editorial responsibility. Naturally, then, we consider our editing to be just about perfect. There's no doubt about it, we Canadians are a superior breed! (in a letter to author Margaret Laurence, dated May, 1960)"
— Jack McClelland (Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters of Jack McClelland)

"But I must submit all my Hopes and Fears, to an overruling Providence, in which, unfashionable as the Faith may be, I firmly believe."
— John Adams (My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams)

"(S)uccessful people, no matter how busy, seem to make time to write letters."
— Mark Demoss

" Alpha rode a crude horse on its way to Omega, and in return gathered a vast look upon its entire journey just as I have gained a great vision into my journey from A to Z. - from "Letter XIV" from "Letters (to nobody)""
— Daniel Scott Batten

"I am always incorrigibly interested in the behaviour of the ‘human animal’, and look forward to perusing divers effusions of your lively pen."
— Kingsley Amis

"Reading is really like trying to hit one tossed stone with another; the consonants are the stones, the vowels their velocity."
— Milorad Pavic (Dictionary of the Khazars)

"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 (The Watcher)

"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.
"
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"No matter what was said, she needed him and she knew deep down that letters were just using your imagination. They were just blank words that tried to take the space of their absence but could never truly do so.
"
— LadyKnight44

"No matter what was said, she needed him and she knew deep down that letters were just using your imagination. They were just blank words that tried to take the space of their absence but could never truly do so."
— LadyKnight44

"Letters always frustrate me with what's left out."
— Eileen Drew (Blue Taxis: Stories About Africa)

"In reading Cicero's letters I felt charmed and offended in equal measure. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger I wrote to him as if he were a friend and contemporary of mine, forgetting, as it were, the gap of time, with a familiarity appropriate to my intimate acquaintance with his thought; and I pointed out those things he had written that had offended me."
— Petrarch