I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in...

To write is human, to receive a letter: Devine!

My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or...

Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.

A person understands other’s language only in tune with his attitude with most people all the time, so it’s wise to act nice with individuals only in proportion with the truth cherished in their lives.

There is no single thing… that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says ‘I am more than just my appearance’. If each object quivers with readiness to...

I am in no mood to fulminate on paper–I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into...

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason...

…there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role...

(Quoting Goethe:)”We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for...

Jeannot la bêtise des amoureux est immense, végétale, animale, astrale. Que faire? Comment te faire comprendre que je n’existe plus en dehors de toi.

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.

I was very pleased with your kind letter. Until now I never dreamed of being something like a hero. But since you’ve given me the nomination I feel that I am one.

I see that I’ve become a really bad correspondent. It’s not that I don’t think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you...

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”(Letter 16, 1657)

I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful...