Letters

Famous quotes containing the word letters:

    “How dare I read Washington’s campaigns, when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbours. It is peeping.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.”
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    “Two months dead, I wrestle with your name
    Whose separate letters make a paltry sum
    That is not you.”
    —Howard Moss (b. 1922)