25 March (1841): Walt Whitman to Abraham Paul Leech
—Of course; I build now and then my castles in the air.—I plan out my little schemes for the future; and cogitate fancies; and...
24 March (1976): Paul Bowles to John Martin
It’s not the rendering of the oral Arabic texts into written English that makes collaborating with Mrabet difficult, but trying to help him maintain some...
23 March (1948): May Sarton to Juliette Huxley
I wait for you to appear to make time not a long treadmill but a flight, a marvelous parabola, an extension of love.
20 March (1932): Katherine Anne Porter to Kenneth Burke
God sends the rain, according to her, and God willed that she should have rheumatism, and it was God who decided that she should forget...
19 March (1954): C.S. Lewis to Eight American Children
In Hugh's picture of the Dufflepuds what I like best (though the D's themselves are quite good) is the ship, just the right sort of...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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,...
5 March (1968): Wallace Stegner to Avis DeVoto
I kind of had the feeling all along that I should tackle Benny, but I always had the feeling too that he was too big...
4 March (1916): Dorothy Canfield Fisher to Sarah Cleghorn
There will be some danger of course, but not more than there always is in doing something worth doing…
3 March (1909): Jack London to The Editor of The Socialist
If Comrade Andrew Anderson ever tells funny stories I wonder if he is so rigid a zealot that he never tells one story that fails...
2 March (1986): Guy Davenport to James Laughlin
Someone should do a study of Ez’s mountains and hills. Like Joyce’s rivers, they bring things into a webwork of meaning. They come from the...
27 February (1974): Martha Gellhorn to Ruth Rabb
Oh god I am so fed up with living; it’s too much work.
26 February (1946): J.F. Powers to Betty Wahl
I must write Harry Sylvester and tell him I am now a public enemy myself. I am referring to the clerical forces now allied against...
25 February (1953): Truman Capote to Andrew Lyndon
The last few weeks here have been filled with peculiar adventures, all involving John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, who’ve nearly killed me with their dissipations…half-drunk...
24 February (1934): Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes
This Spanish opera interpreted by a Negro cast as Spanish saints is too divine, both gay and devout and altogether lovely.
23 February (1961): Charles Bukowski to John William Corrington
I had to sock him down in a poem to stop him from nibbling the eternal edge of my guts.
20 February (1927): Federico García Lorca to Jorge Guillén
At times I despair. I see that I’m not fit for anything. They are things from 1921. From 1921, when I was a child. Perhaps...
