Quotes that I love

Thank-you to Ria at 'How many kilometres?'  for inspiring this blog. I had a couple of other things in mind to write about, but then I headed over to Ria's blog to check out a giveaway that I had heard about via the blogosphere. It sounded like a great giveaway (and it is!) but best of all I liked that she asked her entrants to supply their favourite quote. An excellent idea, and after reading through many of them I began to think about all the wonderful quotes about letters that I have read over the years.

So I have compiled some of my favourite quotes about letters here. You may already be familiar with many of these, but I still think they're worth repeating. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

"There must be millions of people all over the world who never get any love letters... I could be their leader." - Charlie Brown

"Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine." - Samuel Butler.

"Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company." - Lord Byron.

"What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call." - Liz Carpenter.

"A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend." - Emily Dickinson.

"More than kisses letters mingle souls." - John Donne.

"Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and the recipient." - E.M. Forster.

"I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new." - Sigmund Freud.

"Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

 "Write me at the Hotel Quintana, Pamplona, Spain. Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something." - Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment." - Katherine Mansfield. 

"Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements." - Mary Schmich.

"To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart." - Phyllis Theroux.

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." - Mark Twain.

"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity." - Walt Whitman.

And here's one that is not exactly about letter-writing, but sums up why I do many of the thiings I do, including writing letters. Plus Eleanor Roosevelt is such a legend I couldn't compile a list of quotes without including something of hers.

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." - Eleanor Roosevelt.

Do you have a favourite letter quote? I'd love to hear it... in fact, I'd love to hear any quote that means something to you.

Love from Kaz.