Mail Quotes

“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

“The door opened. She looked in the mirror and suppressed a curse. Slipping in behind some tourists, that winged shadow was back again. Karou rose and made for the bathroom, where she took the note that Kishmish had come to deliver.

Again it bore a single word. But this time the word was Please.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“To write is human, to receive a letter: Divine!”
― Susan Lendroth

“Whatever you choose for your stationery is your favorite color because it's where you pour your heart out.”
― Mary E. Pearson, The Miles Between

“If it takes the entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered.”
― Grover Cleveland

“You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else’s mail is a felony but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“… she’s worried more about mail being late than perceiving a death alarm.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“Her entry ticket into the High Auction is supposed to arrive today, and their mail can never be late.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That’s all you need.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“Mrs. Spencer distrusted letters on principle, because they always seemed to want to entangle her in so many small, disagreeable obligations--visits, or news of old friends she had conveniently forgotten, or family responsibilities that always had to be met quickly and without enjoyment.”
― Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings

“Our mailman was a dance teacher at night & I would watch him sometimes to see if he would deliver mail differently than the others. I expected to see him leap over bushes with his toes pointing like arrows, but all he ever did was walk.”
― Brian Andreas, Still Mostly True: Collected Stories & Drawings

“Your dad wasn't a big talker," Sam said, his voice a rumble against my chest. "As you know. But I feel like I could tell, from the way he checked his mail, that he was super proud."
I bit the inside of my cheek. "Could not."
"Oh yeah," he said. "You should've seen it. He'd do this shuffle down the driveway--- it screamed that his daughter was about to become a doctor, he was obnoxious about it, to tell you the truth--- and then he'd open the mailbox and peer inside. Then he'd pull out the envelopes and start sorting them like he was reading through the paper you presented at the pop culture conference last year, the one about masculinity and monstrosity in The Shining---"
I propped myself up on my elbows. "Wait, how---?"
"I Googled you," Sam said. "Anyway, then he'd amble back up the driveway, his gait making it clear to the whole neighborhood that his daughter was strong and empathetic, smart and hilarious, and gorgeous.”
― Alicia Thompson, Love in the Time of Serial Killers

“I wrote you a love letter, and I sent it snail mail. Love is forever, and that’s about how long it’ll take to get to you.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“some letters one really writes to oneself; some letters just describe what it is we hope will be returned.”
― Sheridan Hay, The Secret of Lost Things

“There’s so much love sent through the mail.”
― Sheridan Hay, The Secret of Lost Things

“I do not follow politicians on Twitter; if they want to lie to me, it will cost them a stamp.”
― Carmine Savastano

“When you can’t run and deliver like you used to, make sure your letters still bleed with imagery under the stampede of your wild thoughts and the untamed nature of your signature energy.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“There were twelve deliveries a day in London in 1914. It would be in his hands by mid-afternoon.
Pg5”
― Robert Harris, Precipice

“Dietro, un villaggio scuro, capanne interamente ricoperte di zolle erbose: sono i primi lapponi che abbiamo incontrati; sono sedentari, ma la loro è una miseria terribile: quanti bambini, tutti rachitici e timidi come leprotti. Quelle capanne hanno uno scheletro di assi sul quale si cominciano ad ammucchiare le zolle, rinforzando il tutto con pietre e paletti. Ci infilano un tubo di lamiera, ed è fatta: dentro ci abita almeno una dozzina di persone. Di cosa vivano non so, ma non mendicano, né rubano; sono biondi e con gli occhi chiari, ma dal taglio degli occhi e dagli zigomi ci si può render conto che questo ormai è un altro mondo. Il timoniere ha ragione: il bosco nordico non ha fine e anche se si tratta di betulle storte e ingobbite, un po' spettrali con i propri tronchi bianchi, o di pinastri radi e nodosi, o di cespugli di ontani e salici nani, anche se si tratta di ceppi e moncherini, un tempo tutto questo è stato un bosco, prima dell'arrivo dell'uomo, di una slavina o di qualche altra catastrofe. A dire il vero è più tundra che bosco; c'è così poca terra che i pali del telegrao non possono essere piantati e devono circondarli di una massicciata per ternerli in piedi. Per miglia di viaggio (parlo naturalmente di miglia marine) non c'è traccia dell'uomo, solo qualche capanna lappone in rovina; eppure al margine della tundra, a un tronco di betulla, è appesa una cassetta postale. Se sapessi chi va a ritirarvi la posta gli manderei gli auguri di Natale e cartoline da diverse città e paesi, per il piacere di farli arrivare a quella casetta solitaria nel bosco nordico”
― Karel Čapek, Cesta na sever

“Man brevene med posten bandt
og sagde: Vær ei sene!
De svarte: Vi var aldrig vant
på vei at tælle stene!”
― Petter Dass, Aandelig tids: det er: adskillege Bibelske Historier, uddragen af den ...

“If, somewhere, any possible world can exist, then somewhere there is any letter that could possibly be written. Somewhere, all those checks really were in the mail.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“At first, sending the confession by real mail had felt like a genius device. I would not have to sit by my phone and watch for the signs that indicated it had been sent and seen. Slim but solid paper would, I hoped, convey me better. Now I had to consider the very real frailties of the system. Ludicrous, in fact, to entrust something of such magnitude to a mailman. A perfect stranger. I looked up stories of nefarious New York mailmen. There was one who has willfully upturned the lives of ordinary people like myself by hoarding 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail. The city was crawling with thieves and malcontents.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“He pulled out his keys and unlocked the door. There was a pile of mail waiting on the floor, which made him chuckle. The last memories of normal life, he thought. He picked up his mail and tossed it into the garbage.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“Put together two stock market forecasts - one predicting that prices will rise next month and one warning of a drop.
Send the first mail to fifty thousand people and the second mail to a different set of fifty thousand.
Suppose that after one month, the indices have fallen. Now you can send another mail, but this time only to the fifty thousand who received the correct prediction.
This fifty thousand you divide into two groups: the first half learns prices will increase next month, and the second half discovers they will fall.
Continue doing this. After ten months, around a hundred people will remain, all of whom you have advised impeccably.
From their perspective, you are a genius. You have proven that you are truly in possession of prophetic powers.
Some of these people will trust you with their money.
Take it and start a new life in Brazil.”
― Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly

“I circled a few misspelled words, then handed it back to Theo.
“Do these words mean anything to you?”
“Nights. Reed. Hour. Male.” His eyes widened as he spoke the words aloud. “The knights read their mail? Which knights? Why?”
“Crap,” I muttered. “Someone with influence over your mail doesn’t want you to know whatever’s going on in Margen.”
― C. Rae D'Arc, Don't Marry the Cursed

“Mail boxes were a mass casualty event in hurricane Ian.”
― Steven Magee

“But now here the notes were, in his hands, bringing his secret life bursting into the present and reminding him of how happy he'd been each time he'd unfolded one of them. It was this happiness that had first inspired him to become a postman; in quite a simple way he'd thought that by delivering mail he'd get to spend his life making other people happy.”
― Matt Cain, The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle

“The most important thing is those letters... They keep soldiers connected to the most significant people in their lives. Their families, their children, their wives and mothers. That keeps them motivated to fight and to remember what they are trying to win victory for. You get them those letters, you inspire them to live and fight another day. Without the mail, morale sinks.”
― Joshunda Sanders, Women of the Post

“When you order something from Amazon, the "one click" is the trigger at the beginning of a long global chain. And at the end of that click is the last mile. That "one click" queries cloud-based microservices for inventory and finds the closest fulfillment center. Robots pull the items off a shelf. The parcel zooms down miles of conveyor belts. Humans load it into trucks as palletized loads. Computers then coordinate the trucks, or the blue Amazon 737s turning and burning on the runway. Off to a regional fulfillment center, out to the USPS P&DC, down to the local post office, because all of Amazon's market and computing power comes to grief at the last mile. Those clicks are ultimately handles by old women who curse your nighest name and pray for your death, women who drove three hours to sort your stuff into wire cages and from those cages into the back of my 2012 Tacoma truck. It was good that we lived in this world when the pandemic came, or else millions more would have died around the globe. I am proud to have been part of this big system that helped us survive.

But I also cursed your name. Was curbside pickup too much to ask for your chest-of-drawers-sized deliveries of Variety Pack Quaker Instant Oatmeal? Was forgoing your Gatorade Brand Kiwi Strawberry Propel Zero Calorie Water with Electrolytes and Vitamins C & E too big a sacrifice?”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

“I'm driving as fast as this old crate will stick to the road, slipping in and out of the coefficient of friction and adjusting my trajectory with a little Kentucky windage at the steering wheel because I am behind schedule and this route is almost sixty miles long, and besides, this is where Google Girl says I need to be, headed toward the destination of the next parcel, and I would follow Google Girl's voice to the gates of hell like she was Satan's sweetheart because all summer long I've either been following her, the river, or the passage of the sun across the sky because without something to follow in this time-warp wilderness I'm just lost. Not spatially lost. Geographically, I know exactly where I am. I'm where I grew up, in the hardwood, sedimentary Blue Ridge Mountains, the heart of the Appalachians, the place I thought was home. What I'm feeling is a spiritual disorientation, lost in the sense that I don't know what I'm doing, lost on confronting the reality of being back in my hometown at fifty years of age, delivering the mail.”
― Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home