24 April (1925): Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt
You come straight from the center of your existence to be close to me, and you have become a force that will influence my life...
23 April (1961): Italo Calvino to Mario Socrate
I’d be ready to declare myself a follower of the cosmic literary movement for a period of six months, maybe even a year, accepting its...
22 April (1962): Romain Gary to James Jones
The Thin Red Line, the line between man and beast, so easily crossed, is a realistic fable, symbolic without symbols, mythological and yet completely factual,...
21 April (1919): Robert Frost to Marguerite Ogden Bigelow Wilkinson
I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none. When I saw more than one possible way of...
18 April (1918): Aldous Huxley to Lewis Gielgud
When we are bald and fat, my dear Lewis, how revolting we shall be...
17 April (1932): Zora Neale Hurston to Ruth Benedict
I wonder if the Dept. or any private individual could be induced to put up a little money for me to go to the Bahamas...
16 April (1910): Edith Wharton to Morton Fullerton
It is a cruel & capricious amusement. —It was not necessary to hurt me thus! I understand something of life, I judged you long ago,...
15 April (1886): Emily Dickinson to C. H. Clark
Excuse me for the voice, this moment immortal...
14 April (1946): Evelyn Waugh to Randolph Churchill
Whenever ‘Russia’ is spoken they all start guiltily & their spokesman leaps up to say ‘I protest that that question is anti-democratic, irrelevant, fascist, cannibalistic...
11 April (1920): Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry
Yes, my precious, we’ll divide our time between Sussex which is you, and the South of France, which is me, mystically speaking. We shall never...
10 April (1931): Karen Blixen to Thomas Dinesen
Let me take Ngong, and everything that belongs to it, in my arms and sink with it, and it will be without complaint, but with...
9 April (1779): Horace Walpole to Anne Liddell
To bear a hopeless passion for five years, and then murder one’s mistress—I don’t understand it!...I do not love tragic events en pure perte. If...
8 April (1956): Allen Ginsberg to Louis Ginsberg
The thing I do in class is get them personally involved in what they’re writing and lambaste anything which sounds at all like they’re writing...
7 April (1941): James Jones to Jeffrey Jones
You know there’s really nobody that I can talk to with[out] being afraid of being laughed at, not even you. Right now, I’m afraid you’ll...
4 April (1957): Flannery O'Connor to Maryat Lee
It is not known by everybody but: the peafowl is called peafowl because his favorite dish is peas-green peas, black-eyed peas, sweets or any peas...
3 April (1848): Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams
In other respects, he aims his shafts in the dark, and the success, or rather, ill-success of his hits makes me laugh rather than cry....
2 April (1954): Thornton Wilder to Michaela O'Harra
Is silence and solitude and isolation and leisure necessary for playwriting? It certainly is for poetry and musical composition. It is probably desirable for all...
1 April (1816): Jane Austen to James Clarke
...I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am...
31 March (1971): James Schuyler to Trevor Winkfield
And of course Juillard must not die; nor you feel bored. It’s an ill-kept secret that I’m one of the judges for the O’Hara award...
28 March (1945): Dylan Thomas to Donald Taylor
Today, limp in the hut, watching the exhausting sea...writing little until tomorrow, first, cold thing in the morning, with the dew on the grass, and...
27 March (1848): Henry David Thoreau to Harrison Blake
Let nothing come between you and the light. Respect men as brothers only. When you travel to the celestial city, carry no letter of introduction....
26 March (1924): Graham Greene to Elisabeth Greene
Have you ever noticed how useful numbers are in filling up a letter? Take the tip the next time you write to anyone. If you...
25 March (1607): John Donne to Henry Goodyer
Though my friendship be good for nothing else, it may give you the profit of a temptation or of an affliction. It may exercise your...
24 March (1948): Robert Lowell to Carley Dawson
I've just been to Tenebrae at the Cathedral—a choir of Franciscans in their order’s brown, starched white ropes looped downwards, awkward gangling young men, looking...
