18 March (1941): Virginia Woolf to Leonard Woolf
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
17 March (1965): John Steinbeck to Lyndon B. Johnson
When you have finished using a weapon, someone is dead or injured, but the product of the word can be life and hope and survival.
16 March (1789): Immanuel Kant to Heinrich Jung-Stilling
The principles that you suggest as foundational for a system of legislation cannot serve that purpose properly, since they are valid also as precepts for human beings in the state of nature, even the third of your principles, “Be a member of civil society.” One might raise the question how laws should be given in a civil society that is already presupposed…
13 March (1947): Simone de Beauvoir to Jean-Paul Sartre
And I’m so accustomed here to a life entirely on the surface—a life of pure pleasure and indifference—that it shook me to rediscover my love for you in all its intensity; rather as though I’d started thinking, really thinking, about death in the middle of a pleasure outing.
12 March (1972): Larry L. King to Bill Brammer
I hustled my ass and got you your bail and dope money and you drop me like Texas politicians do when one does a favor for them. Get your ass in gear.
11 March (1985): Edward Abbey to Gerald Marzorati, Harper’s, NYC
Georgia Jones suggests making an open-season range of Manhattan Island. From what I hear, Manhattan—like Los Angeles—has already become exactly that.
#JeNeSuisPasLiberal: Entering the Quagmire of Online Leftism
Yet why is “liberalism” such a bogeyman to this movement? Is it because the non-liberal left appears so dispossessed? We live in an age where the most “radical” book of economics to make a splash, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, explicitly distances itself from Marxism on numerous occasions, and ends by calling only for a modest wealth tax . We live in an age where the Occupy movement, despite its sometimes radical appearance, orients itself around such conventionally liberal reforms as the campaign for a living wage, prosecution of criminal bankers and tougher financial laws (e.g., “Occupy the SEC”), and exhibits a polite antagonism toward the one percent of plutocrats.
10 March (1956): Flannery O’ Connor to Betty Hester
I hate to say most of these prayers written by saints-in-an-emotional-state. You feel you are wearing somebody else’s finery and I can never describe my heart as “burning” to the Lord (who knows better) without snickering.
9 March (1938): Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder
…we are full of projects, and opera, a ballet, a cinema, and you will do the novel yet yes we will, you know Thornton I find so many on the quays and I read them all and I begin to really know what a novel is…
6 March (1901): James Joyce to Henrik Ibsen
As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting—not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly because you are an old man and I a young man, not presumptuously, nor sentimentally—but joyfully, with hope and with love, I give you greeting.