8 September (1852): Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels
You will have observed from my letters that, as usual when I am in it myself and do not just hear about it from afar,...
5 September (1951): Vladimir Nabokov to Edmund Wilson
I love to complain—this is why I am telling you all this.
4 September (1982): Václav Havel to Olga Havlová
Yes: man is in fact nailed down—like Christ on the cross—to a grid of paradoxes: stretched between the horizontal of the world and the vertical...
3 September (1927): Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein
I did not want to write anything that was not fun doing. I knew that if I went on trying to make my living by...
2 September (1916): Willa Cather to Dorothy Canfield Fisher
It’s blooming full-blooded ignorance that makes the bright show, after all. And, my dear, whether it’s a wheat-thrashing or an opera, it’s the Bright Show...
29 August (1967): Graham Greene to Christopher Sykes
He said, ‘He had no right to bring his mistress to Carol Reed’s house for dinner.’ I said, ‘But I had my mistress with me.’...
28 August (1926): Rebecca West to John Gunther
It isn’t, as my family has always conspired to make me believe and as H. G. in his sadism loved to tell me, that I...
27 August (1962): Ted Hughes to Vicky Watling
Marriage, of course, is a bloody monster, but it eats up many little snakes.
26 August (1912): Wallace Stevens to Elsie Viola Kachel
Walking through the dark, to a strange place, with that mystical lantern in the trees, I could hear the early bells, calling for vesper-services. All...
25 August (1819): Lord Byron to Teresa Guiccioli
...I feel I exist here, and I feel I shall exist hereafter,—to what purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with you...
22 August (1944): Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac
I’ve been escorting la belle dame sans mercip [Edie Parker] around all morning — first to Louise’s, now to jail. I haven’t a permit, so...
21 August (1896): Mark Twain to Olivia Clemens
I eat — because you wish it; I go on living — because you wish it; I play billiards, and billiards, & billiards, till I...
20 August (1951): John Steinbeck to Pascal Covici
And I have ranged the changeable with the continuing. Also I have set down some things which I believe and some things which have not...
19 August (1709): Alexander Pope to Henry Cromwell
As for myself, I would not have my life a very regular play, let it be a tolerable farce, and a fig for the critical...
18 August (1857): Charles Baudelaire to Apollonie Sabatier
Imagine a blend of reverie, sympathy, and respect, together with 1,000 childish deeds, full of seriousness, and you’d have a rough idea of something very...
15 August (1924): Ernest Hemingway to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
...I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about...
14 August (1937): Samuel Beckett to Cissie Sinclair
Jack Yeats does not even need to do that. The way he puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or...
13 August (1860): Oscar Wilde to W.E. Henley
If a man sees the artistic beauty of a thing, he will probably care very little for its ethical import. If his temperament is more...
12 August (1917): Ezra Pound to H.L. Mencken
Apart from Yeats, I have a play by Lady Gregory, and one from Symons (not so valuable). Joyce has been in hospital ever since we...
11 August (1956): Flannery O’Connor to “A.”
We are all rather blessed in our deprivations if we let ourselves be, I suppose…
8 August (1919): H.L. Mencken to Fielding H. Garrison
The truth always lies between: neither party is ever right.
7 August (1952): Italo Calvino to Carlo Salinari
My ideal would be to manage to write in equal measure, and ideally with equal facility, “useful” things and “amusing” things. And possibly things that...
6 August (1899): Edwin Arlington Robinson to Edith Brower
This room is like an oven tonight — or I would not be so generous in the matter of margins.
5 August (1929): Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’Keeffe
I’ll never be able to hold you again. So I fear. But I really don’t fear. It looks like snow. Nothing can surprise me.
