"Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain."

Bowen, Elizabeth on loneliness
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"Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company."

Byron, Lord on letters
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"How frail and ephemeral is the material substance of letters, which makes their very survival so hazardous. Print has a permanence of its own, though it may not be much worth preserving, but a letter! Conveyed by uncertain transportation, over which the sender has no control; committed to a single individual who may be careless or inappreciative; left to the mercy of future generations, of families maybe anxious to suppress the past, of the accidents of removals and house-cleanings, or of mere ignorance. How often it has been by the veriest chance that they have survived at all."

Drew, Elizabeth on letters   

"A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."

Durrell, Lawrence on letters
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"Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing."

Eliot, George on letters
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"Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires..."

Hardwick, Elizabeth on letters   

"It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment --but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?"

Byron, Lord on memory   

"Never forget what you need to remember."

Bartley, Garrett on memory   

"If you want to win friends, make it a point to remember them. If you remember my name, you pay me a subtle compliment; you indicate that I have made an impression on you. Remember my name and you add to my feeling of importance."

Carnegie, Dale on memory
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"Sweet is the memory of past troubles."

Cicero, Marcus T. on memory
3 fans of this quote   

"Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control."

Connolly, Cyril on memory   

"Oh, how cruelly sweet are the echoes that start when memory plays an old tune on the heart!"

Cook, Eliza on memory   

"There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery."

Dante Alighieri on memory
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"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."

Asch, Sholem on memory
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"Memory is the scribe of the soul."

Aristotle on memory
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"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing."

Bunuel, Luis on memory   

"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."

Bowen, Elizabeth on experience   

"The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart."

Bowen, Elizabeth on absence
3 fans of this quote   

"A letter does not blush."

Cicero, Marcus T. on letters   

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