Selected Letters Quotes

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“open me carefully”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“The past is not a package one can lay away.”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid –”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing cocks, and singing larks, and a rising sun to awake her; or else we'll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place. We'll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds -- we will blow out the sun, and the moon, and encourage invention. Alpha shall kiss Omega--we will ride up the hill of glory -- Hallelujah, all hail!”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“My dying tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet, but Death was much of Mob as I could master-then-And when far afterward-a sudden light on Orchards, or a new fashion in the wind troubled my attention- I felt a palsy, here- the Verses just relieve-" (174)”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no Biographer -”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters