Letters To Nowhere Quotes

Are you texting a boy?"
"No," I said, "a boy is texting me. ~ Julie Cross

I don't feel like a whole person anymore. Something is missing and I'm afraid I can't ever get it back. ~ Julie Cross

You can't conquer everything in a day. Or even a week. Maybe not even a year. There's no way to work hard at grieving. You just have to let it happen. And you are, so don't fight it. ~ Julie Cross

[ ... ]he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked
insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words
Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most
remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in. ~ Douglas Adams

To acknowledge the receipt of letters is always proper, to remove doubts of their miscarriage. ~ George Washington

It may be that these loan arrangements conform to the letter of the law, but they do not conform to the spirit of the law and to the principle of transparency on which it is based. ~ Bill Vaughan

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children's letters - sometimes very hastily - but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, "Dear Jim: I loved your card." Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, "Jim loved your card so much he ate it." That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it. ~ Maurice Sendak

Oh, yes! Fill the churches with dirty thoughts! Introduce honesty to the White House! Write letters in dead languages to people you've never met! Paint filthy words on the foreheads of children! Burn your credit cards and wear high heels! Asylum doors stand open! Fill the suburbs with murder and rape! Divine madness! Let there be ecstasy, ecstasy in the streets! Laugh and the world laughs with you! ~ Grant Morrison

It's Nathaniel Hawthorne Month in English. Poor Nathaniel. Does he know what they've done to him? We're reading The Scarlet Letter one sentence at a time, tearing it up and chewing on its bones.
It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break
these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward? ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

He turned the pages in steady progression, though now and then he would seem to linger upon one page, one line, perhaps one word. He would not look up then. He would not move, apparently arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not yet impacted, his whole being suspended by the single trivial combination of letters in quiet and sunny space, so that hanging motionless and without physical weight he seemed to watch the slow flowing of time beneath him, thinking All I wanted was peace thinking, ~ William Faulkner

Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience ... Moving ... compassionate. ~ Leigh Newman

It was a clear autumn day Sunday in 1876; Vincent van Gogh, twenty-three years old, left the English boarding school where he was teaching to give a sermon at a small Methodist church in Richmond, a humble London suburb. Standing in front of the lectern, he felt like a lost soul emerging from the dark cave in which he had been buried.

The sermon, which survives among Vincent's collected letters, reiterates universal ideas and is not an outstanding example of the art of homiletics. Nevertheless, his words grew out of his tormented life and had an intense emotional charge. Preaching to the congregation, he was also preaching to himself -- and of himself. The images he used were the same as those that were to be given powerful expression in his pictures.

The text chosen for the sermon was Psalm 119:19, 'I am a stranger on the earth, hide not Thy commandments from me.' ~ Albert J. Lubin

Now, about Markham V. Reynolds (Junior). Your questions regarding that gentleman are very delicate, very subtle, very much like being smacked in the head with a mallet. Am I in love with him? What kind of a question is that? It's a tuba among the flutes, and I expect better of you. The first rule of snooping is to come at it sideways - when you began writing me dizzy letters about Alexander, I didn't ask if you were in love with him, I asked what his favorite animal was. And your answer told me everything I needed to know about him - how many men would admit that they loved ducks? (This brings up an important point: I don't know what Mark's favorite animal is. I doubt it's a duck.) ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom ... ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers and things, finding pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair - hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box, broke when it was opened. Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style of the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love, others that asked for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered nothing at all. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Without the letters of condolence, telegrams of congratulations, and occasional postcards, the friendship of a separated friend is not a social reality. It has no existence without the rites of friendship. Social rituals create a reality which would be nothing without them. It is not too much to say that ritual is more to society than words are to thought. For it is very possible to know something and then find words for it. But it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts. ~ Mary Douglas

I should get rid of those boxes, full of all that junk. Burn them all – make a bonfire in the garden and burn the bloody lot of it. All the captured bits of me, the scraps and pictures and notes and letters, burn it all, burn the lot of it – every last trace of me. Every last bit of me – up in flames and gone for good. Forgotten and gone. Rid me of these memories... Yes, that's something to do this afternoon. Get out into the garden, and burn the past... To ashes with. ~ Jonny Glynn

I get a lot of letters from introverts asking how they can meet people. The key is to make sure that you are doing things you enjoy. ~ Susan Cain

Some people on bus seats shake at the shoulders,
Stoned Elvises trying to dance after the gig.

Some walk into the rain and look like they're smiling,
Running mascara writes sad bitter letters on their faces.

Some drive their cars into lay-bys or park edges
And cradle the steering-wheel looking like headless drivers.

Some sink their open mouths into feather pillows
And tremble on the bed like beached dolphins.

Some people are bent as question marks when they weep
And some are straight as exclamation marks.

Some are soaking in emotional dew when they wake,
Salt street maps etched into their faces.

Some find rooms and fall to the floor as if praying to Allah.
Noiseless
Faces contorted in that silent scream that seems like laughter.

Why is there not a tissue-giver? A man who looks for tears,
Who makes the finest silk tissues and offers them for free?

It seems to me that around each corner, beneath each stone,
Are humans quietly looking for a place to cry on their own. ~ Lemn Sissay

He hated Egypt and he's buried in Egypt. "What could be worse than being buried in a cemetery where you know nobody, Monsieur Jacques?" he would ask.
"And I tell you what. Worse than dying is the thought that no one will ever come to your grave, that no one will come wash the letters of your name. Everyone remembers for a few months, a few years, on anniversaries, and then, a generation later, they forget you. And the earth might as well make dust of you, for you're as good as unborn - you never were born - even if you live to be a hundred. ~ Andre Aciman

If you are ever forced to take a chemistry class, you will probably see, at the front of the classroom, a large chart divided into squares, with different numbers and letters in each of them. This chart is called the table of elements, and scientists like to say that it contains all the substances that make up our world. Like everyone else, scientists are wrong from time to time, and it is easy to see that they are wrong about the table of elements. Because although this table contains a great many elements, from the element oxygen, which is found in the air, to the element of aluminum, which is found in cans of soda, the table of elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise. The element of surprise is not a gas like oxygen, or a solid, like aluminum. The element of surprise is an unfair advantage, and it can be found in situations in which one person has sneaked up on another. The surprised person - or, in this sad case, the surprised person - are too stunned to defend themselves and the sneaky person has the advantage of the element of surprise. ~ Lemony Snicket

Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all. ~ Saint Basil

Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning ~ Michael Swanwick

Friends will write me letters. They run out of room on the front of the letter. They write 'over' on the bottom of the letter. Like I'm that much of a moron. Like I need that there. Because if it wasn't there, I'd get to the bottom of the page: 'And so Kathy and I went shopping and we
' That's the craziest thing! I don't know why she would just end it that way. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.
What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now? ~ Bill Shapiro

In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You'd be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

And what mattered most was not that I needed to see and hear that I was beautiful. No, what mattered most was that I was in love with a young woman whose love for me introduced me to the vastness of the universe, the infinite and the finite, from Timbuktu to me, the young Ever Park brother who played basketball and wrote secret letters, and who sometimes just happened to, you know, stumble in and find Kaya in the library after school. ~ Matthew Aaron Goodman

If I could write a letter to my teenage self, I'd probably say something like: 'You ain't gonna believe what will become of you.' ~ Antony Sher

She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose.
"I want nothing from life except you," he wrote. "I want to be with you forever, to work and write for you, to live wherever you want to live, to love nothing, nobody but you, to love you with the passion of earth but also with the above earthly elements of more eternal, spiritual love. ... "
He did not, however, get his wish. ~ Erik Larson

I remember once kissing you, your face lit by northern stars. Promising to grow old with you, and now so simply breaking the promise. ~ Carew Papritz

But it will make mistakes," she says. "Hadoop will probably get us from a hundred thousand buildings down to, like, five thousand."
"So we're down to five days instead of five years."
"Wrong!" Kat says. "Because guess what
we have ten thousand friends. It's called"
she clicks a tab triumphantly and fat yellow letters appear on the screen
"Mechanical Turk. Instead of sending jobs to computers, like Hadoop, it sends jobs to real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians."
She commands King Hadoop and ten thousand Estonian footmen. She is unstoppable. ~ Robin Sloan

Don't wait for mentors to seek you out. Don't ever wait for your phone calls to be returned, your letters to be answered, your faxes to be responded to. Keep going out and asking question. ~ Denis Waitley

As a biographer, I try to uncover the adventures and personalities behind each character I research. Once my character and I have reached an understanding, then I begin the detective work reading old books, old letters, old newspapers, and visiting the places where my subject lived. Often I turn up surprises, and of course, I pass them on. ~ Jean Fritz

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. ~ Todd Rundgren

The Taking Of Turns

Monday, June 14, 2010
You are in some songs that still get played on the radio when the DJ is feeling nostalgic.
You are in a book you once lent me (never returned) with yellowed pages.
You are in trees when I touch them, even ones without names carved into them.
You are in the way someone on the street laughs as I pass them.
You are in a box I keep filled with letters.
You are in a ring I no longer wear.
And, every day, you each get a moment to haunt me. ~ Iain S. Thomas

Oh, to be the author of prison letters. It's a young girl's dream come true. ~ Jenny B. Jones

But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.
("New York Blues") ~ Cornell Woolrich

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

It's a heck of a responsibility to look after a spirit. So give kids the best of who you are. That's the most you can ever do. ~ Carew Papritz

Anything goes when everyone knows

Where do you hide when their highs are your lows?

So much, so hard, so long, so tired,

Let them eat until you're ground into nothing.

Don't you worry your glossy little lips.

What they savor 'ventually loses it's flavor.

I wanna lick, while you still taste like you.

Bookmark it, says the cheerleader

I promise we'll come back to this spot.

I have shit to do first. You won't wait a lot.

I can't make her stay,

and I can't watch her go.

I'll keep her hellfire heart,

And bookmark it 'fore it goes cold.

Fifty-seven times I didn't call

Fifty-seven letters I didn't send,

Fifty-seven stitches to breathe again, and then I fucking pretend.

Fifty-seven days to not need you

Fifty-seven times to give up on you

Fifty-seven steps away from you,

Fifty-seven nights of nothing but you. ~ Penelope Douglas

Keep a clear eye toward life's end. Do not forget your purpose and destiny as God's creature. What you are in his sight is what you are and nothing more. Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take nothing that you have received ... but only what you have given; a full heart enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage. ~ Francis Of Assisi

There is something about the burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live. ~ Edmund De Waal

My first celebrity crush was Jonathan Brandis. I even got to talk to him on the phone. I wrote a fan letter, and he answered. Talk about a surreal experience. ~ Jennifer Armentrout

I've gotten letters, but mostly from Bible-belt types who say, you must be Satan! They come right out and call me Satan and hope that I'm damned to hell. ~ George A. Romero