19 February (1949): Kenneth Patchen to Kenneth Rexroth
This time I got mad, decided to go down and picket with a sign in front of Times Bldg: I CHALLENGE THE RIGHT OF THE NY TIMES TO BURN MY BOOKS.
18 February (1962): Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman
You and Jonathan Williams have thrown off the shackles of the sentence and the wide melody. For me the sentence lies in wait—all those prepositions and connectives—like an early spring flood.
17 February (1971): Anne Sexton to Stanley Kunitz
It’s strange that you say I’m “too tough” for my “blazing hurry” (that sentence makes no sense, but you know what I mean). People are always telling me I’m tough. Maybe because I’ve survived so much.
16 February (1953): Amy Clampitt to Philip Clampitt
Why are people so afraid of being enthusiastic? I don’t think it’s so much laziness as the fear of turning out to be wrong. But who knows what is right anyway? If one only feels the right things one might as well not feel anything…
13 February (1945): Vladimir Nabokov to Edmund Wilson
It is a rare illness, as is everything about me, and I have had it already twice in my life.
12 February (1948): William Gaddis to Charles Socarides
But this growing fiction fits so insanely well with fact of life that sometimes I can not stand it, must burst (as I am doing here). And then I ruin it by bad writing. Like trying to be clever—this perhaps because I am afraid to be sincere?
11 February (1935): Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to Maxwell E. Perkins
My dinner partner was an inoffensive preacher, and I disgraced myself thoroughly by asking my hostess what the devil she meant by putting me next to a parson, and announcing in a clear voice “The hell with all preachers.”
10 February (1917): John Dos Passos to Arthur K. McComb
If death wasn’t such a very simple humdrum thing, even death would become ridiculous by the tinsel griefs, the red eyes and black crape and all the silliness of people making themselves miserable because they think they ought to be.
9 February (1984): M.F.K Fisher to Norah Kennedy Barr, Anna Parrish, and Mary Kennedy Wright
As for the expense, they cost no more than the kind of rest-home or nursing-home you might find, that you would want me to end my life in. There are a few, perhaps, but we all know that most of them are simply living graveyards…and that living corpses are not often treated as decently as dead ones.
6 February (1939): Tennessee Williams to Edwina Dawkins Williams
Things came to a climax this past week when a Jewish society photographer in the first floor studio gave a party and Mrs. Anderson expressed her indignation at their revelry by pouring a bucket of water through her kitchen floor which is directly over the studio and caused a near-riot among the guests.