Personal Correspondence Quotes

And I always keep cards people send me. I have a whole wall covered with them.

I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.

No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.

Now that the mail is operating normally again, a horde of censors are busily slitting open letters to probe for hidden meaning among the trivia of family and business correspondence, and when in doubt they fall back on us.

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.

I am sorry for people who can't write letters. But I suspect also that you and I ... love to write them because it's kind of like working without really doing it.

It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.

I'd gone to Oxford to do graduate studies in the history of the slave trade, but I came across Georgiana's letters, gave up that thesis, and wrote one on her instead. When I learned that Georgiana's great-nephews supported opposite sides in the American Civil War, I knew this would be the perfect sequel.

A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

It was a blessing and also a curse of handwritten letters that unlike email you couldn’t obsessively reread what you’d written after you’d sent it. You couldn’t attempt to un-send it. Once you’d sent it it was gone. It was an object that no longer belonged to you but belonged to your recipient to do with what he would. You tended to remember the feeling of what you’d said more than the words. You gave to object away and left yourself with the memory. That was what it was to give.

People write me letters and say I should answer them. But I don't like to answer letters. I don't write letters. I've never written my mother one.

Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.

Write to me frequently & the longest letters possible; never mind whether you have facts or no to communicate; fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

I send thank you notes, not emails, even if I'm staying at a friend's house or something. I'm very old school.

But what can you say in a letter?

In a Man's Letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirrour of his breast.

I'm known for being quite gobby, but also, I'm quite old fashioned in the sense that I like writing letters.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

And it's a pity too that I've no right to open your letters. I hope you don't get many, or my conscience will give me no peace.

Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.

I love the written word; I love when someone takes the time or leaves you a note or sends a letter.

I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.

I just happen to be from the generation that, like a lot of my older friends, started out writing letters.

It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.

I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter.