We are all sailing away to the sea
On this day in letters
Please join me in wishing the happiest of birthdays to the following letters, all written on the tenth day of a February gone by.
Sorry I was so glum. I’m in a cursed mood and can’t bear the human face.
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Ethel Smyth
10th February 1933
—The Letters of Virginia Woolf
As to your notion of an allegory, there is none. Charlotte’s Web is a tale of the animals in my barn, not of the people in my life. When you read it, just relax. Any attempt to find allegorical meanings is bound to end disastrously, for no meanings are in there. I ought to know.
E. B. White
Letter to John Detmold
10th February 1953
—Letters of E. B. White
My husband, T. S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in, the driver said: “You’re T. S. Eliot.” When asked how he knew, he replied: “Ah, I’ve got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: ‘Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about;’ and, do you know, he couldn’t tell me.”
Valerie Eliot
Letter to The Times
10th February 1970
—The Times: Great Letters
Since books are to libraries what asphalt is to highway departments, I assume that Indiana is also asking donations from suppliers of asphalt for her roads. Or has it been decided that asphalt is worth good money, and that books are not?
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to Charles Ewick, Indiana State Library
10th February 1983
—Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
The civilization of any country may always be measured by the degree of equality between men and women; and society will never come truly into order until there is perfect equality and copartnership between them in every department of human life.
Lydia Maria Child
Letter to Mrs. S. M. Parsons
10th February 1877
—Lydia Maria Child: Selected letters, 1817-1880
I have been much moved by your letter; and the pleasure it has given me has some little sorrowful ingredient in it. In the strife and struggle of this great world where most of us lose each other so strangely, it is impossible to be spoken to out of the old times without a softened emotion. You so belong to the days when the qualities that have done me most good since, were growing in my boyish heart that I cannot end my answer to you lightly.
We are all sailing away to the sea, and have a pleasure in thinking of the river we are upon, when it was very narrow and little.
Charles Dickens
Letter to his first love, Maria Beadnell
10th February 1855
—The Selected Letters of Charles_Dickens
I’ve got no advice on these up and down times of elation & depression you seem to have, but I can tell you that time is very dangerous without a rigid routine. If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
Flannery O’Connor
Letter to Betty Hester
10th February 62
—The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
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Thanks for these! It is my birthday today--sixty years!--so these letters are significant to me in a small way.
Valerie Elliot's letter is priceless. I guess now we can answer "Alfie!" (What's it all about?)