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3 October (1839): Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody

…Now, good night, truest Dove in the world. You will never fly away from me; and it is only the infinite impossibility of it that...

1 October (1950): Philip Larkin to Monica Jones

I hope too your room doesn't look sad & lonely now my lethargic cadging figure isn't in it.

30 September (1941): Eudora Welty to Diarmuid Russell

What you look for in the world is not simply for what you want to know, but for more than you want to know, and...

27 September (1963): E.B. White to Stanley Hart White

I feel like a spider in a bathtub—can't get my dragline anchored to anything. (I also walk into glass doors, and take the bruises.)

24 September (1859): Emily Dickinson to Dr. and Mrs. J. G. Holland

We talk of you together, then diverge on life, then hide in you again, as a safe fold. Don’t leave us long, dear friends! You...

23 September (1951): Marianne Moore to William Carlos Williams

As for me, you see me in too good a light. I never held up anything and nobody loved me!

19 September (1931): Malcolm Lowry to Conrad Aiken

Malcolm Lowry writes to friend, poet, and novelist Conrad Aiken from Oslo. Hotell Parkheimen Drammensveien 2, Oslo[September 1931]   Hi there, Colonel Aiken— SS Fagervik[1]—oh...

17 September (1912): Carl Sandburg to Paula Sandburg

They were all heavy with rain drops, sheer white and wild, the sun gleaming rainbows and prisms from them, a pathos of eager living in...

16 September (1933): Dylan Thomas to Pamela Hansford Johnson

If I were some Apollo, it would be different. As a matter of fact, I am a little person with much untidy hair...

13 September (1796): Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin

Now by these presents let me assure you that you are not only in my heart, but in my veins, this morning. I turn from...

12 September (1827): Mary Shelley to Frances Wright

…a woman, young rich & independant, quits the civilization of England for a life of hardship in the forests of America that by so doing...

11 September (1903): Marcel Proust to Georges de Lauris

In the morning I was taken with a mad desire to ravish the little sleeping cities (be sure that you read little sleeping villes and...

10 September (1922): Thomas Wolfe to Margaret Roberts

The great men of the Renaissance, both in Italy and England, seem to me an amazing mixture of God and Beast. [...] What do their...

9 September (1883): George Bernard Shaw to Alice Lockett

The heart of any other man would have stopped during those seconds after you had slowly turned your back upon the barrier and yet were...

5 September (1878): Leo Tolstoy to N.N. Strakhov

Forgive me for jabbering about something you understand better than I do, but I’m so fond of studying the physiology of delusions that I can’t...

4 September (1948): Raymond Chandler to Cleve Adams

For one must bear in mind that they can’t steal your style, if you have one. They can as a rule only steal your...

2 September (1931): John Betjeman to Camilla Russell

Circles and sticks a bird and a tree when will my Miller be wedded to me? Soon, soon. I love you, you hideous little angel....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...
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