style="font-size:15px;"> “I am dreadfully sad. I would like to withdraw from the world; I have only sorrowful impressions of it. I would like to collect all regrets and all good-byes. Seeing you again would suffice for me to recover. Rest assured then that my last rays will still be for you.”
– Germaine de Staël (1766—1817), from a letter to Voght, Geneva, Coppet, dated January 27, 1809, in: “Madame de Staël. Selected correspondence”, translated from the French by Kathleen Jameson-Cemper
“It’s as quiet as the grave here again.”
– Leos Janacek (1854—1928), from a letter to Kamila Stosslova (1891—1935), dated December 2, 1918, in: “Intimate Letters: Leoš Janáček to Kamila Janáček”, translated by John Tyrrell
“I’ve wanted to write you for a long time and who knows what impatience stops me in the middle of letters, what exasperation at my poverty of language. In the end, I’m sending you a few lines so you know that I’m here, that I’m alive, and that if I don’t write it’s because I can’t.
My life here is up and down, it’s the usual flow, hope and hopelessness. Desires to die and to live. Sometimes there’s order, other times the chaos devours me. I think right now it’s the latter. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing you.”
– Alejandra Pizarnik (1936—1972), from a letter to her psychoanalyst, León Ostrov, dated December 27, 1960, in: “Three letters from Alejandra Pizarnik to León Ostrov” by Emily Cooke (https://www.musicandliterature.org/)
“You write that you find everything bewildering, in confusion… It is good for things to be confused, very good! It indicates that you are a philosopher, a smart woman.”
– Anton Chekhov (1860—1904), from a letter to his future wife, Olga Knipper (1868—1959), Yalta, dated September 8, 1900, in: “The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov”, translated from the Russian by Sidonie Lederer
“It’s not consolation that I seek, however, it’s seeing him, and in dreams I tend to have him, and in sensations of his being present in
wakefulness as well, and I go on living from what I receive from both things, and from nothing more than this.”
– Gabriela Mistral (1889—1957), from a letter to Victoria Ocampo (1890—1979), Rio De Janeiro, Brasil, dated 26 October, 1943, in: “This America Of Ours. The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo”, translated by Elizabeth Horan and Doris Meyer
“When you sit in your study reading a book – think of me. I have been deprived of that happiness for two and a half months now.”
– Mikhail Bulgakov (1891—1940), from a letter to his friend Pavel Popov, from the sanatorium at Barvikha to Moscow, dated December 1, 1939, in: “Manuscripts don’t burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, a life in letters and diaries”, edited by J.A.R.Curtis
“‘I would like, oh, I really would like, to be able to swim away in my tears’.”
– Etty Hillesum (1914—1943), probably in a letter to Father Han and friends, from a Westerbork transit camp for Jews, quoiting some woman’s words at the camp, dated August 24, 1943, in: “An Interrupted Life: Diaries and Letters 1941—43. And Letters from Westerbork”, translated from the Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans
“I would not quit you for all the women in the world. You are the soul of my life, my very existence, and it is all because you love me and have warmed it to life, the bruised and broken ruins of my bosom.”
– Nathaniel Dawson (1829—1895), from a letter to Elodie Todd (1840—1877), Camp Davis, Lynchburg, dated May 11, 1861, in: “Practical Strangers. The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln”, edited by Stephen Berry and Angela Esco Elder
“I love you… I need you. You can help me more than anyone on earth.
Forgive me for the things I do not know, the things I can not fight alone, the things I haven’t understood. You know better than anyone else how stupid and unwise I am, how I must battle the darkness within my self. No one else would help me. No one else would care as you care. No one else would even try to understand. The door is never closed between us… Only the ugly shadow of my self stands in the way now.”
– Langston Hughes (1902—1967), from a letter to Charlotte Mason, in: “The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902—1941, I, Too, Sing, America”, by Arnold Rampersad
“… you are punishing me with your silence, or even by wrenching me out of your heart because of my egoism, because my feelings are only ‘words, words, words,’ ‘literature’; if they were real, I would have proven my love in deeds and not in sighs recorded on paper.”
– Boris Pasternak (1890—1960), from a letter to Olga Freidenberg (1890—1955), Moscow, dated June 29, 1948, in: “The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910—1954″, translated from the Russian by Elliott Mossman and Margaret Wettlin
“Nothing in the world could give me a greater thrill than to take you (roundabout expression) or even just feel your secret parts… each letter, each photo, only increases appetites. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”
– Henry Miller (1891—1980), from a letter to Brenda Venus (born 1947), dated July 15, 1976, in: “Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters of Henry Miller to Brenda Venus”
“A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse.”
– Oscar Wilde (1854—1900), from a letter to Bernulf Clegg, dated 1891, in: “Oscar Wilde: A Life In Letters” by Merlin Holland
“… no sort of literature can surpass real life in its cynicism; you cannot intoxicate with one glassful a person who has already drunk his way through a whole barrel.”
– Anton Chekhov (1860—1904), from a letter to Maria Kiseleva, Moscow, dated January 14, 1887, in: “The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov”, translated from the Russian by Sidonie Lederer
“The wind is careless – uncertain – I like the wind – it seems more like me than anything else – I like the way it blows things around – roughly – even meanly – then the next minute seems to love everything – some days is amazingly quiet.”
– Georgia O’Keeffe (1887—1886), from a letter to Alfred Stieglitz (1864—1946), Canyon, Texas, October 1, 1917, in: “My Faraway One. Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Volume 1, 1915—1933″
“How such love and warmth do us good and how sad that they don’t go on to set people on fire the way hate and other bad characteristics do! How strange that weeds are more fertile than good
