Query Letters Quotes

I would have died, before a literary agent ever committed to my book. This is why I chose to empower myself by self publishing. ~ Mary Sage Nguyen

Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we'd shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we'd had and those selves we'd been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you'd never read again. ~ Dennis Lehane

Whenever I got those rejection letters, then, I would permit my ego to say aloud to whoever had signed it: You think you can scare me off? I've got another eighty years to wear you down! There are people who haven't even been born yet who are gonna reject me someday - that's how long I plan to stick around. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Invoking the letters of God's Name without presence of mind is invocation of the tongue; invoking with presence of mind is invocation of the heart; and invoking with an absence of self-awareness because of absorption in the Invoked is the invocation of the Self - this is the hidden invocation! ~ Ibn Ata Allah

My letters seeking a job, though truthful, diminished the full truth. Face would blanch if the facts had been complete: "Dear Sir," I thought. "Do you have a position for a journeyman burglar, con man, forger and car thief; also with experience as armed robber, pimp, card cheat and several other things. I smoked marijuana at twelve (in the 40's) and shot heroin at sixteen. I have no experience with LSD and methedrine. They came to popularity since my imprisonment. I've buggered pretty young boys and feminine homosexuals (but only when locked up away from women). In the idiom of jails, prisons and gutters (some plush gutters) I'm a motherfucker! Not literally, for I don't remember my mother. In my world the term, used as I used it, is a boast of being hell on wheels, outrageously unpredictable, a virtuoso of crime. Of course by being a motherfucker in that world I'm a piece of garbage in yours. Do you have a job? ~ Edward Bunker

When I write to you, I feel your breath; when you read them, I imagine you feel mine. Is it that way with you too? These letters are part of us now, part of our history, a reminder forever that we made it through this time. Thank you for helping me survive this year, but more than that, thank you in advance for all the years to come. ~ Nicholas Sparks

It is well enough, when one is talking to a friend, to lodge in an odd word by way of counsel now and then; but there is something mighty irksome in its staring upon one in a letter, where one ought to see only kind words and friendly remembrances. ~ Mary Lamb

Nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them ... ~ Jan Struther

The imagination is also sometimes commended for offering us in vicarious form experiences which we are unable to enjoy at first hand. If you can't afford an air ticket to Kuala Lumpur, you can always read Conrad and imagine yourself in South-East Asia. If you have been monotonously married for forty years, you can always lay furtive hands on a copy of James Joyce's letters. Literature on this view is a kind of supplement to our unavoidably impoverished lives - a sort of spiritual prosthesis which extends our capabilities beyond their normal restricted range. It is true that everyone's experience is bound to be limited, and that art can valuably augment it. But why the lives of so many people should be imaginatively impoverished is then a question that can be easily passed over. ~ Terry Eagleton

Great material progress has not been matched by great spiritual progress. Quite the opposite. Indeed, from this point of view perhaps man has never been so poor as since he became so rich.
Letters against the war: Letter from the Himalayas, 2008. ~ Tiziano Terzani

Writers don't like to write letters. Too much like work. ~ Mari Sandoz

Writing letters is thinking, just as talking to you is thinking. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It occurred to me in my junior year of high school. I got my first letter from a big college. I still have that letter to this day - a letter from Indiana. ~ Bo Jackson

My sons served excellent missions, and returned to participate in college athletics. In their letters home, and even now that they have been back for some time, they frequently mention that the experiences in the mission field were the choicest and most gratifying of their lives. You young men, begin to prepare yourselves now for this marvelous experience. ~ LaVell Edwards

And the artist, Jaume Plensa's philosophy?" "No, not that." Philippe continued, his voice becoming quietly intimate. "I read an interview with him that touched me deeply. The feeling he expresses through this work is that letters are like bricks. They help us to construct our thoughts. He described his belief that our skin is permanently and invisibly tattooed with the text of our life experiences, and then someone comes along - a friend, a lover - who is able to decipher these tattoos." Biting ~ Patricia Sands

Society is rigid. Everyone knows everyone else in their world. Everyone has their place in the scheme of things. If you don't belong to a family, a tribe, a village, a guild, whatever, you don't exist then, either. And you can't just pitch up somewhere without mutual acquaintances, recommendations, or letters of introduction. Life on the fringes of society, any society in any time, is tough. ~ Jodi Taylor

When parents talk about their pasts, the stories start to stick in your head. But the memories that you inherit look different from the now-world, and different from your own memories, too. Like they have a color all their own. I don't mean sepia-toned or something. My parents aren't even that old. I just mean that there is something particular about their glow. ~ Ava Dellaira

The simple combination of letters and sounds you select as a name for your baby can result in a life of carefree coolness or decades of expensive therapy. Hi, I'm Jake versus Hi, I'm ... Tapioca ~ Paul Reiser

The world isn't always what's right in front of you, you know? It's below, it's above, it's out there somewhere. Every burn of every light inside every house I see when I look down from the rooftop has a story. Sometimes we just need to change our perspective.
And when I look down at everything, I remember that there's more out there than just what's going on in my house - the bullshit with my dad, school, my future. I look at all those full houses, and I remember, I'm just one of many. It's not to say we're not special or important, but it's comforting, I guess. You don't feel so alone. ~ Penelope Douglas

I love reading and am always stuck in one labrinth of letters or other ~ Sarah Vowell

Henceforth letter-writing had to take the place of all the affection that could not be lived. ~ Thornton Wilder

During these three months I have gone through much; I mean, I have gone through much in myself; and now there are the things I am going to see and go through. There will be much to be written. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Here's the fundamental problem: group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. That sentence should be written in capital letters. Every person is unique - and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that variability. Period. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

Damn, she just kept on surprising him. First with her beauty. Then with the illustrations. He'd been forced to accept that there was more to her character than he'd gleaned from her letters, but none of it fell too far outside the borders of his carefully mapped mental territory labeled "Madeline." She was privileged, sheltered, intelligent, curious, and far too crafty.
But this...
This was different.
As he watched her with the tenants' children, his conception of her pushed against its established boundaries. He was forced to add new descriptors to his list. Ones like "generous" and "responsible" and "protective. ~ Tessa Dare

I love that word: us. It's the best, most simple, most incredible two letters ever put together. ~ Melissa C. Walker

You know, there is only one letter's difference between lonely and lovely," I told him once when he was down. "There is only one letter's difference between loner and loser," he retorted. ~ Joey Goebel

From time to time, I hear people speculate on the question, "When does the prophet speak as a prophet, and when does he speak otherwise?" This query seems curious to me, as if one were presumptuous enough to sit in judgment on a prophet. In my close associations with President Kimball, spanning two decades and the spectrum from suffering to sublimity, I have never asked that question. The only question I have asked has been, "How can I be more like him? ~ Russell M. Nelson

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" - was that it? - "I prefer men to cauliflowers" - was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace - Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished - how strange it was! - a few sayings like this about cabbages. ~ Virginia Woolf

We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die. ~ Douglas Coupland

All men of genius, and all those who have gained rank in the republic of letters, are brothers, whatever may be the land of their nativity. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Few are those from whom the Grace withdraws, but many are those who withdraw from the Grace.

Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Yoga, p.613 ~ Sri Aurobindo

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration. ~ Andrew Carnegie

A good play is a good play. If you want to chalk up your rejection letters to the fact that you're a woman, that's your choice. But often you get a rejection letter because your play isn't ready. Or the time isn't ready for your play. And that has nothing to do with gender. ~ Jane Anderson

Books are just dead words on paper and it is the readers who bring the stories alive. Previously, writers wrote a book and sent it out into the world. A couple of months after publication letters from readers might arrive. And, leaving aside the professional reviews, it is really the reader's opinions that the writer needs. They vote for a book - and a writer - with their hard earned cash every time they go into a bookstore (or online - that's my age showing!) and buy a book. ~ Michael Scott

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter. ~ Blaise Pascal

Don't you feel that our brief hurried letters
lack feeling and spirit,
contain no whispers or dreams of love ,
that our responses are slow and burdened . . . ~ Samih Al-Qasim

On the third, directly before me, were embedded more polished letters: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM.
For ever and ever.
In the red light, the brushed steel glowed softly, like embers. The polish letters blazed.
Without a hiss, For ever and ever slid aside, as though inviting me to eternity. ~ Dean Koontz

The calls are for updates and to see how her day went. The letters are for the things I can't always say out loud. ~ Kiera Cass

I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly. ~ Henry David Thoreau

There's nothing like new life to make you believe in the world again, my dear, don't you forget that. ~ Emily Williams

I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Maimonides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night. ~ Amos Oz

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first. ~ Edna O'Brien

Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters. ~ Ernestine Rose