Can’t say that I learned anything during the pandemic except that I loved being in lockdown and miss it (…). But for me, a perfect day is one in which I never leave the house.
—Mary Ruefle, My typewriter interview with Mary Ruefle, Austin Kleon, 26 de Março de 2024
No, you may not send us your verses, and we will not give you the name of another publisher. We hate no rival publisher sufficiently to ask you to inflict them on him. The specimen poem is simply awful. In fact, we have never seen worse.
—Angus & Robertson Ltd., carta de rejeição para F. C. Meyer, 10 de Abril de 1928 (não desistiu e acabou a publicar a sua poesia)
Modern life gets less and less worth living, is my solemn conclusion. Wherever you go there are always people.
—William Maxwell, carta para Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1 de Março de 1954,
Before I go on with this short history let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible” come true.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Esquire (magazine), The Crack-Up, Fevereiro de 1936
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.
—Franz Kafka, carta para Milena Jesenska, Novembro de 1920 (via Letters of Note).