Unread Letters Quotes

The unread is always better than the unreadable.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

Safe Sex If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words; if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel— then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread, no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation, no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge

A dream uninterpreted is like a letter unread.

Moments of pure relaxation were rare for me. There was always the nagging of books unread, work undone, time a-wasting.

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name

Have you ever wondered What happens to all the poems people write? The poems they never let anyone else read? Perhaps they are Too private and personal Perhaps they are just not good enough. Perhaps the prospect of such a heartfelt expression being seen as clumsy shallow silly pretentious saccharine unoriginal sentimental trite boring overwrought obscure stupid pointless or simply embarrassing is enough to give any aspiring poet good reason to hide their work from public view. forever. Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED. Burnt shredded flushed away Occasionally they are folded Into little squares And wedged under the corner of An unstable piece of furniture (So actually quite useful) Others are hidden behind a loose brick or drainpipe or sealed into the back of an old alarm clock or put between the pages of AN OBSCURE BOOK that is unlikely to ever be opened. someone might find them one day, BUT PROBABLY NOT The truth is that unread poetry Will almost always be just that. DOOMED to join a vast invisible river of waste that flows out of suburbia. well Almost always. On rare occasions, Some especially insistent pieces of writing will escape into a backyard or a laneway be blown along a roadside embankment and finally come to rest in a shopping center parking lot as so many things do It is here that something quite Remarkable takes place two or more pieces of poetry drift toward each other through a strange force of attraction unknown to science and ever so slowly cling together to form a tiny, shapeless ball. Left undisturbed, this ball gradually becomes larger and rounder as other free verses confessions secrets stray musings wishes and unsent love letters attach themselves one by one. Such a ball creeps through the streets Like a tumbleweed for months even years If it comes out only at night it has a good Chance of surviving traffic and children and through a slow rolling motion AVOIDS SNAILS (its number one predator) At a certain size, it instinctively shelters from bad weather, unnoticed but otherwise roams the streets searching for scraps of forgotten thought and feeling. Given time and luck the poetry ball becomes large HUGE ENORMOUS: A vast accumulation of papery bits That ultimately takes to the air, levitating by The sheer force of so much unspoken emotion. It floats gently above suburban rooftops when everybody is asleep inspiring lonely dogs to bark in the middle of the night. Sadly a big ball of paper no matter how large and buoyant, is still a fragile thing. Sooner or LATER it will be surprised by a sudden gust of wind Beaten by driving rain and REDUCED in a matter of minutes to a billion soggy shreds. One morning everyone will wake up to find a pulpy mess covering front lawns clogging up gutters and plastering car windscreens. Traffic will be delayed children delighted adults baffled unable to figure out where it all came from Stranger still Will be the Discovery that Every lump of Wet paper Contains various faded words pressed into accidental verse. Barely visible but undeniably present To each reader they will whisper something different something joyful something sad truthful absurd hilarious profound and perfect No one will be able to explain the Strange feeling of weightlessness or the private smile that remains Long after the street sweepers have come and gone.

There was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion.

Did he remember those days when his children were almost certainly six? When there was a pitter-pat in the hallways an hour before dawn? When every object smaller than an apple was nowhere to be found, until it was right underfoot? When books went unread, letters unanswered, and every train of thought was left incomplete? He remembered them as if they were yesterday

Perhaps we shall not see each other again. I will write to you, though, and tell you, as best as I can, the story of your family. A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can, with that same breath, shatter and destroy it. If what I write displeases you, it will not matter. Throw my letters in the fire unread, and keep your illusions. For myself, I have always preferred to know the truth.

Coming to the balcony, they both rested their elbows on the railing and looked down into the main room, which was filled wall-to-wall with patrons. Evie saw the antique-gold gleam of Sebastian’s hair as he half sat on the desk in the corner, relaxed and smiling as he conversed with the crowd of men around him. His actions of ten days ago in saving Evie’s life had excited a great deal of public admiration and sympathy, especially after an article in the Times had portrayed him in a heroic light. That, and the perception that his friendship with the powerful Westcliff had renewed, were all it had taken for Sebastian to gain immediate and profound popularity. Piles of invitations arrived at the club daily, requesting the attendance of Lord and Lady St. Vincent at balls, soirees, and other social events, which they declined for reasons of mourning. There were letters as well, heavily perfumed and written by feminine hands. Evie had not ventured to open any of them, nor had she asked about the senders. The letters had accumulated in a pile in the office, remaining sealed and untouched, until Evie had finally been moved to say something to him earlier that morning. “You have a large pile of unread correspondence,” she had told him, as they had taken breakfast together in his room. “It’s occupying half the space in the office. What shall we do with all the letters?” An impish smile rose to her lips as she added. “Shall I read them to you while you rest?” His eyes narrowed. “Dispose of them. Or better yet, return them unopened.” His response had caused a thrill of satisfaction, though Evie had tried to conceal it. “I wouldn’t object if you corresponded with other women,” she said. “Most men do, with no impropriety attached—” “I don’t.” Sebastian had looked into her eyes with a long, deliberate stare, as if to make certain that she understood him completely. “Not now.

This meant that I went from being the person who responded to everyone all the time, to being a person who doesn’t respond to hardly anyone, at all. At first, it was hard. My text inbox went from typically ten unread messages to over four hundred. I would read letters from readers, and instead of responding with a novel-length letter, I began saving them to a folder and sending out energetic blessings instead. If an email landed in my inbox, I would let it sit sometimes for up to seven days before even opening it. I got to things when I got to things. At first, some people were super annoyed, but after a few years of this practice, people came to understand I don’t respond to things immediately, and sometimes I don’t respond at all. To me, this is the only sane way to live. I’m not chained to my phone or to other people’s expectations of responsiveness. I don’t prove my love by texting back in two minutes.

Reacher saw a vertical array of green message bubbles. Texts. Unreadable foreign words, but mostly regular letters, the same as English. Some were doubled up. Some had strange accents above or below. Umlauts and cedillas.

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name. —Anne Carson, from section “Could 1” of “Candor,” BOMB Magazine (no. 116, Summer 2011)

Theologians have a way of resolving things that are inerrant and writing them down in books that go unread.

The tear-stained letters of my regret will remain forever unread, for I am never going to be strong enough to give them to you.

the envelope

to partake in the cleansing waters of the English channel.

The early evening was approaching, and the sky was beginning to turn that golden colour that it does a little before sunset.

and their hostess, Mrs Bartell, felt no qualms at talking down to her betters.

I am a very ‘unvoracious’ reader, and since I can seldom bring myself to read a work twice I think of the many things that I read – too soon! Nothing, not even a (possible) deeper appreciation, for me replaces the bloom on a book, the freshness of the unread. Still what we read and when goes, like the people we meet, by ‘fate.’ Letter 189 From a letter to Mrs M. Wilson

The distance was not very great,

Hochschild repeats the urban legend that Léopold burned all the EIC documents, going “to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence.” Quite the opposite: Léopold was proud of the EIC and went to extraordinary lengths to leave behind an extensive record. The testimony of his military aide that Hochschild cites about “burning the State archives” and turning “most of the Congo state records to ash” was a misunderstanding: what the aide saw burning were ruined and unreadable papers among the thousands of documents that came back in crates from the Congo in 1908. Léopold left behind 14 trunks filled with his personal letters and financial statements. Everything was carefully cataloged in “a vast room that looked like a post office,” the aide recalled. Some of it went missing in the turmoil of World War II before resurfacing in the basement of a house in 1983. Just last year, researchers at the Royal Museum for Central Africa who work on the EIC archives published a new book, The Congo Free State: What Could Archives Tell Us?

for such nuance, and he knew that being dissociated from schizophrenia merely by degree could be fatal for his credibility. There was nothing he could do, though, so he rose again from the couch, muted the TV, and elected to do the only productive thing he could think of. With a new-found determination, Dan fetched the folder from under his bed and lifted out the unreadable German letter. All of the talk about wartime activity led Dan to think that this letter might be from the 1940s. It would almost explain the stupid writing, he thought. With that in mind he ran each of the letter’s pages through his scanner and looked at the images on his computer, zoomed to a size that helped him identify some of the calligraphic touches as particular letters. The first complete word Dan found — aided initially by the umlaut — was, ominously, Führer. He then successfully identified a few more words from the first page, becoming quite good at spotting instances of “ein” and “eine”. Further progress was hard to come by, though, and Dan soon couldn’t help but feel like he was running through treacle; getting nowhere despite applying himself totally. Dan looked at the time in the top corner of his computer’s screen and did a double take when he saw that more than 90 minutes had passed since he turned it on. He saved his annotated progress and decided to call it a night. The computer chimed as it powered off, which struck Dan as odd, but he shrugged it off. As he walked to turn off the TV — now replaying Billy Kendrick’s tenacious interview from immediately after Richard’s press conference — Dan heard the chime again. Doorbell, he realised. Dan stayed still. In the unlikely event that Mr Byrd had come to check on him this late, he would say so. He usually called through the door. No voice came. After a long gap that left Dan thinking that the caller had gone, he heard three rushed knocks on the window. “Dan McCarthy,” the visitor shouted at the glass. The high-pitched voice sounded vaguely familiar but was heavily muffled by the window. Beginning to realise that the visitor wasn’t going away any time soon, Dan walked towards the door. When he got there he heard footsteps on the other side, and then someone lowering themselves to the ground. “Dan McCarthy!” a chirpy voice called through the gap at the bottom of his door. He recognised it now. After a few seconds, Dan opened the door and saw a smartly dressed young woman crouched to the ground with her head on his doormat. She jumped to her feet, smiling warmly. “Dan McCarthy,” she said, holding out her hand. “Emma Ford. From the phone, remember?

page. I knew Alice was a sly one right from the start, Marigold had written rather unkindly. It looks as though she will be the first of us to get married – bags I be her bridesmaid – though I don’t know whether Tom’s actually popped the question yet. Did you think I was head over heels in love with him, like you? Because if so . . . Damn her eyes, Maddy thought furiously. How dare she insinuate I was ever in love with Tom Browning, or anyone else for that matter! Oh, how typical of Marigold to assume that everyone else feels just as she does. I could wring her neck! She screwed the letter up into a ball and guessed she was probably red in the face from sheer indignation, for half the occupants of the cookhouse were staring at her and the other half regarding her screwed-up letter with more than usual interest. She told herself not to be an idiot and carefully unravelled the crumpled pages, quickly scanning the rest of the unread sheet. Nothing of interest here, except that Marigold asked if Maddy knew that