Letters To Milena Quotes

All right then, I'll be mad at you on this score, which incidentally is no great misfortune, as things balance out quite well if there's a little anger for you lurking in one corner of my heart. ~ Franz Kafka

There is nothing sadder than the cheerful letters of the dead, expressing hopes that were never fulfilled, ambitions that were never achieved, dreams cut off before they could come to fruition. ~ Barbara Mertz

But Holms had proven stalwart and valiant. When Miss Jones had shown up to discover them in the castle hallway, because she'd heard a suspicious noise and had feared for her schoolchums' safety, they' d had to bring her along. She'd wanted to run straight to the headmistress, of course, but Armand had persuaded her not to. How he regretted that decision now!
The duke had fired his guns at them all. They'd retreated, thought to go to the automobile to fetch a doctor and the sheriff, but they'd stumbled the wrong way and fallen down the slope to the beach instead. All three of them. And there, noble Jesse had died.
Fact. Fiction. Likely because so much of it had happened, and because Armand's red-eyed, stoic distress seemed so genuine, the adults around us had accepted it as truth.
Mostly.
I think if I hadn't been discovered wearing only Armand's coat as I knelt next to Jesse's body, Mrs. Westcliffe might have found the whole thing easier to swallow.
Yet the official version ruled the day. And here we all were basking in it, breathing fresh sea air, warmed by the generous spring sun. Burying a hero. A far, far greater hero than anyone standing around me at his funeral would ever suspect.
Somewhere in deep-blue briny waters, a U-boat rested, filled with live torpedoes and solid-gold men.
I thought I better understood Rue's letters now. I understood her warning about the pain that would come with my Gifts.
I understood my sacrifice. ~ Shana Abe

Self-publishing in comics is core to the whole artform. There is no scarlet letter in comics as there still is, to some degree, in prose. As no publisher for a long time would publish serious work in comics, the only way a lot of it came out was because of self-publishing. Many of the greatest works of the medium are self-published. ~ Kieron Gillen

And then another letter had come from Christopher, so devastating that Amelia wondered how mere scratches of ink on paper could rip someone's soul to shreds. She had wondered how she could feel so much pain and still survive. ~ Lisa Kleypas

This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found
I have letters that even the blind will be able to see ... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,
I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race ... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I am strangely addicted to the writing of long letters, which, I am afraid, tire you; and for the future, I believe, I must be less communicative, in order to be less troublesome. ~ Mary Collyer

Her next words took me by surprise. I lay as still as I could, barely breathing, afraid that if I moved she would stop speaking her heart.
"My mom wanted six children. She only got me, and that sucks for her because I was a total weirdo."
"You were not," I said.
She twisted her head up to look at me.
"I used to line my lips in black eyeliner and sit cross-legged on the kitchen table … meditating."
"Not that bad," I said. "Crying out for attention."
"Okay, when I was twelve I started writing letters to my birth mother because I wanted to be adopted."
I shook my head. "Your childhood sucked, you wanted a new reality."
She snorted air through her nose. "I thought a mermaid lived in my shower drain, and I used to call her Sarah and talk to her."
"Active imagination," I countered. She was becoming more insistent, her little body wriggling in my grip.
"I used to make paper out of dryer lint."
"Nerdy."
"I wanted to be one with nature, so I started boiling grass and drinking it with a little bit of dirt for sugar."
I paused. "Okay, that's weird."
"Thank you!" she said. Then, she got serious again. "My mom just loved me through all of it. ~ Tarryn Fisher

Since you haven't got a name," he said. "I guess you can pick one for yourself. Would you like to pick one for me to write down?"
She stopped rocking and looked at him. "I can do that? It's legal and everything?"
He smiled. "It's a free country again," he said. "At least in theory."
She nodded. "And when I pick a name it can be any name I want?"
He nodded.
"What's your name?"
"Victor," he said. "Vic, for short."
"Okay," she said, leaning forward and taking the pad from under his large thing hands. "How do you spell that?"
He spelled it and she wrote it down. Her handwriting was perfectly small and legible. "Can I be Victor, too?" she said, looking up from the pad.
He smirked. "It's a boy's name," he said. "You're a girl. You have to add an i and an a to the end if you want to make it a girl's name."
She looked down at the name she had written and added the letters i and a to the end. "Victoria," she said, passing the notepad back to the cop.
"Hello, Victoria," he said, smiling, taking the pad and pen back and presenting his hand for a shake. "It's nice to meet you, officially. ~ Benjamin R. Smith

One cat just leads to another.
[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943).] ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

A book is a possibility," he says. "It is always prepared to speak. Even someone who does not understand its language can pass it on to others who can read it very well, so that it may do its wicked work on them. Or he could learn the language, and if there's no one to teach it to him, he might find a way to teach it to himself. That's not unheard of either. It can be achieved purely by examining the letters, by counting their frequency, by contemplating their pattern, for the human mind is powerful. ~ Daniel Kehlmann

But his letters . . . I took them with me, let the "ounces" cry aloud. I tried to leave, and could not. They would not be left; it was not my fault. I will not be scolded. ~ Nancy Moser

His penmanship was shamefully crabbed. Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page. His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, "No Drunk Natives."

Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke.

Now, I'll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It's just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not.

Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter's generation. And let's not forget some ~ Thomas King

If I were dying when I should've, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I'd have to kill him, then – then I would've written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They're here, they're grown-up, they're crap, and so we'll bicker towards oblivion. ~ Will Self

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him.

Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways.

This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls.

Listen to some of these stats: ~ Bill Maher

What are you talking about? What was in those letters?" "First, let me ask you, did you get them?" Judging by the panicked look in his eyes, he had. "Did you even open them?" He didn't have to answer for her to guess. A bitter laugh erupted. "Nope. You didn't bother, did you? Just chucked them in the trash, just like you did me and your son." Nope, he didn't know, and she wondered if he'd remember seeing as how he hit the ground pretty hard. She didn't stick around to find out. ~ Eve Langlais

Whoso List to Hunt
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas! I may no more.
The vain travail hath worried me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means, my worried mind
Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain;
And graven in diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame."
Sir Thomas Wyatt ~ Thomas Wyatt

I work in the house next to where I live. We bought a smaller house that I use as my office and the place where my two employees work ... We've got tens of thousands of letters from kids stored all over the house in places you would usually put dishes and other things like that. ~ Jeff Kinney

This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom. ~ Yukio Mishima

In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word. ~ Gaston Bachelard

I travel for the great stories now ready tell, and those waiting to be told. ~ Carew Papritz

Beneath the table, Ryder releases my hand and lays it open in my lap, palm up. And then I feel him tracing letters on my palm with his fingertip.
I. L. O. V. E. Y.O.U.
I can't help myself--I shiver. I shiver a lot when Ryder's around, it turns out. He seems to have that effect on me.
"Are you cold, Jemma?" Laura Grace asks me. "Ryder, go get her a sweatshirt or something. You two are done eating, anyway. Go on. Take her into the living room and light the fire."
"Nah, I'm fine," I say, just because I know the old Jemma would have argued.
"Well, go work on your project, then. It's warmer in the den."
"My room's like an oven," Ryder deadpans, and I have to stifle a laugh, pretending to cough instead.
"Take her up there, then, before she catches cold. Go. Scoot." Laura Grace waves her hands in our direction.
We rise from the table in unison, both of us trying to look as unhappy about it as possible. Silently, I follow him out. As soon as the door swings shut behind us, he reaches for my hand and pulls me close.
"Shh, listen," I say, cocking my head toward the door.
"I still can't believe it," comes Laura Grace's muffled voice. "The both of them, going off to school together, just like we always hoped they would. They'll find their way into each other's hearts eventually, just you wait and see."
I hear my mom's tinkling laughter. "I guess their plan to escape each other didn't work out so well after all, did it, now? I'm sur ~ Kristi Cook

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you're a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes like you always swore you would so that the two of you could dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak - It was the book! It was the pressure! - and every hour like clockwork you say that you're so so sorry. You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more, and, Ya, and you will have to move from the Harlem apartment that you two have shared. You consider not going. You consider a squat protest. In fact, you say won't go. But in the end you do. ~ Junot Diaz

No one OWES you a THING. So don't EXPECT it. You're on your OWN. ~ Carew Papritz

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east;
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
"Can't he make it talk" -
The melodion, I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade -
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse ~ Patrick Kavanagh

Plato is widely believed to have been a student of Socrates and to have been deeply influenced by his teacher's unjust death. Plato's brilliance as a writer and thinker can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious ~ Plato

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction. ~ Tahereh Mafi

I am sure that no one coming to this ceremony expected a High Court judge to use the occasion to talk about that four-letter word, love. But that's a good thing. In life, never be predictable. It's so uncool. ~ Michael Kirby

But are the twin souls destined to be together? Synchronicity is at work here to bring the two back together again. How entrancing to find the same magical alchemy still at work, just as it was at the first meeting – a recognition of a deep rooted love so entrenched and so accepted, it could only have been forged in other lifetimes together. And probably that is what love at first sight is, recognition of an ancient love. ~ Chimnese Davids

A real love letter is absolutely ridiculous to everyone except the writer and the recipient. ~ Myrtle Reed

Perhaps I should admit on the title page that this book is "By L. Frank Baum and his correspondents," for I have used many suggestions conveyed to me in letters from children. Once on a time I really imagined myself "an author of fairy tales," but now I am merely an editor or private secretary for a host of youngsters whose ideas I am requested to weave into the thread of my stories...My, what imaginations these children have developed! Sometimes I am fairly astounded by their daring an genius. There will be no lack of fairy-tale authors in the future, I am sure. My readers have told me what to do with Dorothy, and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, and I have obeyed their mandates. They have also given me a variety of subjects to write about in the future: enough, in fact, to keep me busy for some time. I am very proud of this alliance. Children love these stories because children have helped to create them. My readers know what they want and realize I try to please them. The result is satisfactory to the publishers, to me, and (I am quite sure) to the children. I hope, my dears, it will be a long time before we are obliged to dissolve partnership. ~ L. Frank Baum

You care, you really care for me!" "Of course," Eric said. "How could you doubt it?" But it was not easy to believe that anyone cared for me; I sometimes failed to realize, I think, how much my parents cared for me. It is only now, reading the letters they wrote to me when I came to America fifty years ago, that I see how deeply they did care. And perhaps how deeply many others have cared for me - was the imagined lack of caring by others a projection of something deficient or inhibited in myself? I once heard a radio program devoted to the memories and thoughts of those who, like me, had been evacuated during the Second World War, separated from their families during their earliest years. The interviewer commented on how well these people had adjusted to the painful, traumatic years of their childhood. "Yes," said one man. "But I still have trouble with the three Bs: bonding, belonging, and believing." I think this is also true, to some extent, for me. ~ Oliver Sacks

After reading binge prompted by convalescence, "As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace. ~ Philip Zaleski

American culture is one that is so easily in denial. We have such a strange dichotomy, so hypocritical. The truth can be blaring in neon letters but our culture will find a reason not to hear what the truth is. ~ RuPaul

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum
however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology
he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him ... (from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124). ~ W.B.Yeats

Writing to her, I was no longer lonely ... I could tolerate anything as long as I had a notepad and a pen and could pour my heart out to her in these letters. ~ Portia De Rossi