Letter To Gorky Quotes

When a person expends the least possible amount of energy on a certain act, that is grace. ~ Anton Chekhov

I feel the gods are pretty dead, though I suppose I ought to know that however, to be somewhat more philosophical in the matter, if atheism means simply not being a theist, then of course I'm an atheist.
[Letter to Max Otto] ~ John Dewey

The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism. ~ Jaroslav Pelikan

We only had a couple of ways for people to hate us on 'X-Files,' including still writing actual fan letters. Now people can instantly tell you, 'Oh my God, I love you,' or 'Oh my God, you are the worst person on the planet.' They actually had to hate you enough or love you enough to write a letter, put a stamp on it and send it. ~ Jeffrey Bell

Pudge/Colonel:
"I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself.

But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss,

I guess. And I had this secret.
You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how

I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide.

She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would ~ John Green

People who refuse to let go often make small requests that appear reasonable, like Tommy's letter of reference, though the real purpose of such requests is to cement attachment or gain new reasons for contact. ~ Gavin De Becker

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.
Letter to James Madison, October 28, 1785 ~ Thomas Jefferson

It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand. ~ Joan Robinson

Desmond ushered the man inside. He was stooped and ugly, with an unkempt beard and unwashed clothes, yet Father greeted him pleasantly and asked his name.
"Yoren, as it please m'lord. My pardons for the hour." He bowed to Arya. "And this must be your son. He has your look."
"I'm a girl," Arya said, exasperated. If the old man was down from the Wall, he must have come by way of Winterfell. "Do you know my brothers?" she asked excitedly. "Robb and Bran are at Winterfell, and Jon's on the Wall. Jon Snow, he's in the Night's Watch too, you must know him, he has a direwolf, a white one with red eyes. Is Jon a ranger yet? I'm Arya Stark." The old man in his smelly black clothes was looking at her oddly, but Arya could not seem to stop talking. "When you ride back to the Wall, would you bring Jon a letter if I wrote one?" She wished Jon were here right now. He'd believe her about the dungeons and the fat man with the forked beard and the wizard in the steel cap. ~ George R R Martin

The stench of the pigpens made him take shallow breaths. Michael desperately wanted another drink to drown his sorrows…or, more aptly, his angers. He promised himself that once he found the source of the problem, he'd head to Rigsby's and let alcohol smooth the edge off his ire. Maybe with a few drinks in him, he could better handle Prudence. Nothing else I've tried has worked.
"Michael!"
At the sound of his wife's voice, he stiffened. Speak of the devil. Is there a word for female devil? He couldn't think of one. He nodded good-bye to Hong and was stepping away when---
"Michael, I want to talk to you!" Her voice rose until the timbre was almost a shriek. She ploughed pell-mell for him, her face red with anger.
Hong ducked into his tent. Out of sight, maybe, but not out of earshot.
The Guans' should stuff cotton in their ears to block out the worst of Prudence's screeches.
"I need a drink," he said, beginning to turn away.
"Oh, dear Lord. Don't tell me you're a drunkard like that Obadiah Kettering. Is that another thing you omitted to tell me about your character?"
He swung back.
She was inches away, arms flung wide.
"You omitted telling me I'd be marrying a shrew," he said. "You should have written the word at the top of your fancy stationary in big block letters." He sketched the word in the air and stated each letter. "S-H-R-E-W."
"Why…why I never!" Her mouth opened and closed as if she sought just the right words to h ~ Debra Holland

How deaf and stupid have I been!" he thought, walking swiftly along.
"When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not
scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and
worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter
by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book
of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated be-fore I read, scorned the symbols and letters, I called the visible world a
deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless
forms without substance. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have in-deed awakened and have not been born before this very day. ~ Hermann Hesse

I grow more intolerant of fools as the years roll on. If I had a son, I was saying, I would take him from school at the age of fourteen, not a moment later, and put him for two years in a commercial house. Wake him up; make an English citizen of him. Teach him how to deal with men as men, to write a straightforward business letter, manage his own money and gain some respect for those industrial movements which control the world. Next, two years in some wilder part of the world, where his own countrymen and equals by birth are settled under primitive conditions, and have formed their rough codes of society. The intercourse with such people would be a capital invested for life. The next two years should be spent in the great towns of Europe, in order to remove awkwardness of manner, prejudices of race and feeling, and to get the outward forms of a European citizen. All this would sharpen his wits, give him more interest in life, more keys to knowledge. It would widen his horizon. Then, and not a minute sooner, to the University, where he would go not as a child but a man capable of enjoying its real advantages, attend lectures with profit, acquire manners instead of mannerisms and a University tone instead of a University taint. ~ Norman Douglas

Harvey Publications hired me as a letterer, and they found out six seconds after I got the job that I couldn't letter. I still can't letter. So, they hired me to draw. ~ Ernie Colon

Ink was black, in inkwells and bottles, in the past. It would get all over your fingers because it would run and flow relentlessly. This inevitable messiness was the flip side of writing. I always felt caught between two kinds of black: that of the dirty and dirtying substance and that of the signs that miraculously emerged from it through the magic of wayward fountain pens, which, when dipped too deep in the inkwell, had a strong tendency to cover the paper with what used to be called "inkblots." Oh, the miracle of a clear and possibly elegant sentence emerging from the sticky ink and wending its way between the blots! It is the black of meaning wrung from the black of matter. (…) Isn't the most profound education the one that was afforded me at my childhood elementary school, the one that divides the ink sharply between thought become Letter and drive turned into splotches and blots? How will those who begin with the darkish gray on the palish gray of computer screens manage? Without the slightest inkblot? Won't they think that thought is just another variation of formlessness, that the intellect is just a thin additional coat of gray over the gray of drive, and drive a mere stripping of the gray of the intellect? Everything in the world is the result of a creative and careful dosing of black as it is projected onto the formidable invariability of white. Anyone who hasn't experienced this, and sooner rather than later, will never learn anything. ~ Alain Badiou

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

The dot was introduced as a symbol for multiplication by Leibniz. On July 29, 1698, he wrote in a letter to Johann Bernoulli: I do not like X as a symbol for multiplication, as it is easily confounded with x ... ~ Gottfried Leibniz

If someone you know is diagnosed with cancer, give them a call or send them a letter to tell them how sorry you are and to let them know how much you care. ~ Mallory Ortberg

He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. ~ Thomas Pynchon

I love all the girls who have my song on their myspaces. I love the people who come to my shows and put the pictures on here. I love the people at those shows who sing along with me. I love reading your stories in emails, some so touching they've given me chills. I love every single person who has wanted my autograph, because for the life of me I never really thought it would mean something to someone for me to write my name down. I love the little girls who stand in line with their mothers like I used to do. That was me. I love the couple who danced to my song at their wedding. Every comment, letter, and message. I love people who listen to the radio. I love every single person who is reading this, because you've let me into your life.
I love you all so much, I just wanted you to know. ~ Taylor Swift

Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one? ~ Kate DiCamillo

Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came, - the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon, - that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure, - he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.

The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

As the episode of Scandal ended, I sat up in my bed and thought, I have to read it again. It was driving me crazy, so I got out of bed and skipped down stairs of my comfy loft on the east side of Paradise Hills.

Once downstairs I slipped the letter out of the side closure of my briefcase. I walked back to my bedroom, and I began reading the note left for me. ~ Hazel Cartwright

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair. ~ E.B. White

When a man sends you an impudent letter, sit right down and give it back to him with interest ten times compounded, and then throw both letters in the wastebasket. ~ Elbert Hubbard

We are beginning to shift into life code. And in the process of shifting into life code, every life form on this planet is coded in a double helix with a sugar phosphate backbone. And that codes whether you become a bacteria, an orange, a lemon, a Lemur, a Cow, a sheep, a human being, a politician, any one of these things is all coded in this four-letter code. ~ Juan Enriquez

It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view. ~ Colin Wilson

I moonlighted during a two-week vacation, doing a month's worth of work in two weeks; it almost killed me, but I wanted to stretch my muscles and the letter from the producer says, "Your storyboarding is Eisensteinian," referring to the famous Russian filmmaker. ~ Mike Royer

As it is my practice here to conceal nothing, I shall relate on this page the episode of the wall. Virigilia and Lobo Neves were soon to sail. Entering Dona Placida's house, I saw on the table a folded piece of paper. It was a note from Virgilia. It said that she would be waiting for me in the garden at sundown, without fail. It concluded, "The wall is low on the side toward the little path."
I made a gesture of displeasure. The letter seemed to me extraordinary audacious, ill-considered, and even ridiculous. It not only invited scandal, it invited it together with laughter and sneers. I pictured myself leaping over the wall and caught in the act by an officer of the law, who led me off to jail. "The wall is low…" And what if it was low? Obviously Virgilia did not know what she was doing; perhaps by now she wished she had not sent the note. I looked at it, a small piece of paper, wrinkled by inflexible. I felt an urge to tear it in thirty thousand pieces and to throw it to the wind as the last vestige of my adventure; but I did not do so. Self-love, shame at the thought of fleeing from danger…There was no way out; I would have to go.
"Tell her I'll go."
"Where?" asked Dona Placida.
"Where she said she would wait for me."
"She said nothing to me."
"In this note."
Dona Placida stared. "But this paper, I found it this morning in your drawer, and I thought that…"
I felt a queer sensation. I reread the paper and looked at it a long t ~ Machado De Assis

When someone reads a text whose meaning he wants to comprehend, he does not despise the signs and letters, calling them deceptive, contingent, and worthless husks, but rather he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, the I who wished to read the book of the world and the book of my own essential being, I have, for the sake of a previously imagined meaning, held these signs and letters in contempt, calling the world of appearances deception, calling my eye and my tongue themselves contingent, and worthless appearances. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have indeed awakened, and today is the first day of my new life." --Siddhartha ~ Hermann Hesse

I looked up--for he was half a head taller than I--into his gold-colored eyes, and though their expression was merely contemplative, and his manner mild, I felt my neck go hot. Turning away from that direct, steady gaze, I just couldn't find the words to ask him about his mother's political plans. So I said, "I came to ask a favor of you."
"Speak, then," he said, his voice just a shade deeper than usual.
I looked over my shoulder and realized then that he was laughing. Not out loud, but internally. All the signs were there; the shadows at the corners of his mouth, the sudden brightness of his gaze. He was laughing at me--at my reaction.
I sighed. "It concerns the party I must give for my brother's coming marriage," I said shortly, and stole another quick look.
His amusement was gone--superficially, anyway.
"You must forgive my obtuseness," he murmured. "But you could have requested your assistance by letter."
"I did. Oh." I realized what he meant, and then remembered belatedly one of Nee's more delicate hints about pursuit--and pursuers. "Oh!" So he hadn't guessed why I'd come; he thought I'd come courting. And, well, here we were alone.
My first reaction was alarm. I did find him attractive--I realized it just as I was standing there--but in the way I'd admire a beautifully cut diamond or a sunset above sheer cliffs. Another person, finding herself in my place, could probably embark happily into dalliance and thus speed along her true purpo ~ Sherwood Smith

Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), there shall be no check to my genius from beginning to end. ~ Jane Austen

I search the language for a word
to tell you how red is red. ~ Lisel Mueller

I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime I am aware that no man living knows better than I do the habits of our birds. ~ John James Audubon

Do you mean to tell me that Mr. Trevor read my letter?" demanded Lady Buxted indignantly. "Your secretary?"
"I employ him to read my letters," explained his lordship.(Alverstroke)
"Not those written by your nearest and dearest!"
"Oh, no, not them!" he agreed. ~ Georgette Heyer

The letter was the one that Albert Bridges had sent to their aunt. Of course, Marian hadn't doubted he was who he said he was.She hadn't needed proof.
But she pretended to be satisfied with the proof he offered and with a sniff and a shoveof her spectacles more tightly to the top of her nose,she said primly, "Very good.I'm glad we are in capable hands," and she walked away.
It was probably his annoyance that made him say to her back, "Capable? No,just my hands." At least,she hoped it was just his annoyance. ~ Johanna Lindsey

The testimony of the Bible is clear. The God of Jesus, of Peter and of Paul, and of Abraham and Jacob is a living God. He calls himself "I AM," not "I WAS." Scripture isn't a brittle and crumbling letter from a God long silent. The Bible proclaims a God of visions, fresh words, and new revelations. To believe the Bible is to believe in such a God. ~ Philip Gulley

And when you do find this letter, you know what? Something extraordinary will happen. It will be like a reverse solar eclipse - the sun will start shining down in the middle of the night, imagine that! - and when I see this sunlight it will be my signal to go running out into the streets, and I'll shout over and over, "Awake! Awake! The son of mine who once was lost has now been found!" I'll pound on every door in the city, and my cry will ring true: "Awake! Everyone listen, there has been a miracle - my son who once was dead is now alive. Rejoice! All of you! Rejoice! You must! My son is coming home! ~ Douglas Coupland

The one affectation I have forced on the publisher ... are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter. ~ Andy Rooney

A Letter to Andre Breton, Originally Composed on a Leaf of Lettuce With an Ink-dipped
Carrot

On my bed, my green comforter
draped over my knees like a lumpy turtle,
I think about the Berlin Wall of years that separates us.
In my own life, the years are beginning to stack up
like a Guinness World Record's pile of pancakes,
yet I'm still searching for some kind of syrup to believe in.
In the shadows of my pink sheet, I see your face, Desnos' face,
and two clock faces staring at each other. I see a gaping wound
that ebbs rose petals, while a sweaty armpit
holds an orchestra. Beethoven, maybe.
A lover sings a capella, with the frothiness of a cappuccino.
Starbucks, maybe. There's an hourglass, too, and beneath the sands
lie untapped oil reserves. I see Dali's mustache,
Magritte's pipe, and bowling shoes, which leaves the question--
If you could time travel through a trumpet, would you find
today and tomorrow too loud? ~ Jarod Kintz

What most moved me in his letter was the sense of frustration that permeated the lieutenent's words: the frustration of never quite being able to depict or explain anything to his full satisfaction. ~ Haruki Murakami