30 August (1797): Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin
Mrs Blenkinsop tells me that I am in the most natural state, and can promise me a safe delivery—But that I must have a little patience
29 August (1939): James Agee to Father James Flye
Meanwhile I am thirty and have missed irretrievably all the trains I should have caught.
28 August (1904): Franz Kafka to Max Brod
This season which has only an end but no beginning puts us into a state so alien and natural that it could be the death of us.
27 August (1962): Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath
I have too much at stake and am too rich a person to live as a martyr…I want a clean break, so I can breathe and laugh and enjoy myself again.
26 August (1908): Edith Wharton to W. Morton Fullerton
How can it be that the sympathy between two people like ourselves, so many-sided, so steeped in imagination, should end from one day to another like a mere “passade”—end by my passing, within a few weeks, utterly out of your memory?
Interview with Donald Katz, CEO & Founder of Audible.comFrom the Print
I said to them, ‘We need to understand that we’re the last generation of writers that can think of themselves as Victorian gentlepeople, living above the marketplace…’
TEMPLUM: Verdigris/Lapis/Reborn in the Purple
For those uninterested in the history of materials, it may seem strange that some colors cannot exist divorced from their material wellspring. Mummy Brown, for example, is a brown obtained from the ground up fragments of Egyptian mummies…
23 August (1846): Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet
You dislike the cast of my mind: the rockets it sends up displease you: you’d like me to be more consistent, more uniform, in my affections and my language. That should be you, you! who are now doing as others do, as everybody does—blaming me for the only good thing about me, my leaps and starts, my naive outbursts.
22 August (1920): John Dos Passos to Thomas P. Cope
I have a sensation of sliding slowly and comfortably down ice on the slopes, without ever being able to grasp a handful of the real earth—Your letters are tufts of grass say—seaweed! that I can catch hold of for a moment.
21 August (1972): Charles Bukowski to Patricia Connell
A relationship without love is comfortable because you are always in control if the other person loves you. But the one who is in love really has the benefits because (he) (she) is thriving, throbbing, vibrating. I would certainly rather be in love if I had a choice but one doesn’t always have this choice.