Quotes on Letters

I made one great mistake in my life-when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made but there was some justification-the danger that the Germans would make them.

You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.

The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans said that those who pass judgment on others are 'inexcusable.' The moment we judge someone else, he explained, we condemn ourselves, for none is without sin. Refusing to forgive is a grievous sin-one the Savior warned against.

So long as we govern our nation by the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, we can be sure that our nation will grow in strength and wisdom and freedom.

Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.

What was so extraordinary to me about going through this box of my mother's letters and diaries was meeting my mother not as my mother, but as a real person. And what breaks my heart is that I had no idea how self-aware she was and how protective of me she was.

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.

It doesn't hit you until you pull up to the hospital, and you see 'cancer' in big letters, and you're the patient. Then it all kind of comes home.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. ... (when asked who wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening') Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you can imagine it taking two men to write one song. ... Good authors, too, who once knew better words now use only four-letter words writing prose. ... Brush up your Shakespeare and they'll all kowtow.

How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)

As for the bracelet Mom wore to the funeral, what I did was I converted Dad’s last voice message into Morse code, and I used sky-blue beads for silence, maroon beads for breaks between letters, violet beads for breaks between words, and long and short pieces of string between the beads for long and short beeps, which are actually called blips, I think, or something. Dad would have known.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.

Some providences, like Hebrew letters, must be read backwards.

I will never have a photograph of her to carry around in my pocket. I will never have a letter in her handwriting, or a scrap-book of everything we've done. I will never share an apartment with her in the city. I will never know if we are listening to the same song at the same time. We will not grow old together. I will not be the person she calls when she's in trouble. She will not be the person I call when I have stories to tell. I will never be able to keep anything she's given to me.

It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.

Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, 'Children's Letters to God.' You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.'