Quotes about Letters

This marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment! It's for divine transformation (theosis), not intellectual or "small-self" coziness.

Says John Updike, 'Serifs exist for a purpose. They help the eye pick up the shape of the letter. Piquant in little amounts, sanserif in page-size sheets repels readership as wax paper repels water; it has a sleazy, cloudy look.

I saw how the Bible isn't a book about how to get into heaven, it's a library of poems and letters and stories about bringing heaven to earth now, about this world becoming more and more the place it should be. There is very, very little in the Bible about what happens when you die. That's not what the writers were focused on. Their interest, again and again, is on how this world is arranged.

The earth is God's book but in our blindness, we have obliterated letters so we may say God has abandoned us. It is we who are illiterate.

When I was in Cardiff, playing with the National Orchestra of Wales, they said they get letters from people complaining if they're smiling during the concert. Nuts, isn't it? As if you have to respect the solemnity of the music by not smiling. Music is this joyful thing that enriches our lives, and you're not supposed to smile?

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.

15th June, 1872.—Lewalé doubts Sangara on account of having brought no letters. Nothing can be believed in this land unless it is in black and white, and but little even then; the most circumstantial details are often mere figments of the brain. The one half one hears may safely be called false, and the other half doubtful or not proven.