1 July (1876): Anton Chekhov to Mihail Chekhov
You recognize your insignificance?...Recognize it before God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intelligence, nature, but not before men. Among men you must be...
30 June (1923): Sherwood Anderson to Alfred Stieglitz
The central notion is that one’s fanciful life is of as much significance as one’s real flesh-and-blood life and that one cannot tell where the...
27 June (1928): Harold Ross to Ralph Barton
I am not competent to manage more space than this. I would be if I were a fairy. Fairies are the happiest people there are....
26 June (1939): Jean-Paul Sartre to Simon de Beauvoir
You must be having a sad time, my poor dearest, and more than once I’ve found myself very moved as I imagined your fragile little...
25 June (1919): James Thurber to Robert and William Thurber
I have about as much interest in [soccer games] as a Russian Wolf Hound evinces in the V shaped motor of the Cadillac engine.
24 June (1845): Margaret Fuller to James Nathan
Now, dear friend, I have told you all the gossip. I wish I could do better, but I cannot. Indeed there are soul-realities. I feel...
23 June (1919): T.S. Eliot to Ottoline Morrell
I feel completely exhausted and especially depressed by my awareness of having lost contact with Americans and their ways, and by the hopelessness of ever...
20 June (1945): Dawn Powell to Maxwell Perkins
I caught the language again quickly and the familiar combination of open hearts and closed minds that represents so much of the country except New...
19 June (1843): Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford
It was a terrible struggle for me to see him...with the great gulf of these three years between the last time & this now, &...
18 June (1804): Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Sara Coleridge
So terribly has fear got the upper hand in my habitual feelings, from my long destitution of hope and joy...
17 June (1926): Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
I’ll tell you that I disenjoyed myself extremely; would have exchanged all the champagne in the cellar for a glass of Rodmell water; would have...
16 June (1918): George Orwell to J.R. Ackerley
When a book of mine is discussed at the length of a column there shall be at least some mention of what I have actually...
13 June (1961): Brainard Cheney to Flannery O’Connor
It may seem irresponsible of us to speak of the delights of our visit with you all, since the near fatal and grim involving you....
12 June (1955): Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just
There is still a little too much snap, snap, off with his head, or hers, the hell with croquet!...
11 June (1811): Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener
What is man without his soul? he is not man...What are vegetables without their vegetative power? stones without their stony?...
10 June (1951): Jack Kerouac to Neal Cassady
I wrote that book on COFFEE…remember said rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks...Remember! COFFEE! (try...
9 June (1935): Katherine Anne Porter to Caroline Gordon
I don’t want to be a scourge to anybody, I merely would like to stop being a scourge to myself...
6 June (1837): Amos Bronson Alcott to Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quacks! Quackery! Poor sick, infirm, lunatic Humanity...
5 June (1928): Carl Sandburg to Helen Keller
Possibly the finest thing about your performance is that those who hear and see you feel that zest for living, the zest you radiate, is...
4 June (1858): William Makepeace Thackeray to Adelaide Anne Procter
We can’t help what we write though; an unknown Something works within us and makes us write so & so...
3 June (1940): John Fante to Pascal Covici
I’ll write a book that will make any of Steinbeck appear like small peanuts. You keep this letter. You wait. You reread this letter in...
2 June (1924): F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins
As a matter of fact the American peasant as "real" material scarcely exists...
30 May (1870): Louisa May Alcott to the Alcott Family
We are now reveling in big strawberries, green peas, early potatoes, and other nice things, on which we shall grow fat as pigs.
29 May (1967): Allen Ginsberg to the General Public
Almost all official persons concerned seem subject to nineteenth century fainting spells, the official kind that our Eastern grandmothers complained of...
