Open Letter Quotes & Sayings

There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death. — Robert A.F. Thurman

It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing. — William L. Shirer

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006] — Harper Lee

Answer Professor Mandell's letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily "Stop that!" Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides. — J.D. Salinger

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. — Paul Fussell

He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, Live. — Rumi

[Nicholson] Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open letter he wrote to the British people on 3 July 1940. "Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans," wrote the Mahatma. "I want you to fight Nazism without arms." He went on to say: "Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." I must say that everything in me declines to be addressed in that tone of voice — Christopher Hitchens

Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write. — Nicholas Sparks

Just know what is happening in your mind - not happy or sad about it, not attached. If you suffer see it, know it, and be empty. It's like a letter - you have to open it before you can know what's in it. — Ajahn Chah

He laughed, a big, open-mouthed laugh that made her think of words beginning with the letter O. — Kerrigan Bane

Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you. — Neil Gaiman

He sensed the presence of death, he sensed the presence of undying love: something broke open inside him, and he thought of the invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate, as one might think of distant music. — Stefan Zweig

Suppose I say summer, write the word "hummingbird," put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you. — Catherine McKenzie

Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, "My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too." I imagined Phil's mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil's food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich. Another time he said, regarding his father's late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn't help, it would just make the checks even later. "It's a vicious circus," Phil said. When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation - the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling - might help, he said, "I'm virtuously certain it wouldn't," looking martyred and older than his years. — Laura Kasischke

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, Throw me out! But instead of throwing her out, he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain.
Anyone who has failed to benefit from the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more. — Milan Kundera

Frances is a sealed letter. It doesn't matter where she's been or who's pawed her, no one gets to handle the contents no matter how grimy the envelope. And it's for sure no one's going to be able to steam her open. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

The absurdity of public-choice theory is captured by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in the following little scenario: "Can you direct me to the railway station?" asks the stranger. "Certainly," says the local, pointing in the opposite direction, towards the post office, "and would you post this letter for me on your way?" "Certainly," says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing. — Linda McQuaig

blogosphere attacked Jobs for being too controlling, he decided to write and post an open letter. Bill Campbell, his friend and board member, came by his house to go over it. "Does it sound like I'm just trying to stick it to Adobe?" he asked Campbell. "No, it's facts, just put it out there," the coach said. Most of the letter focused on the technical drawbacks of Flash. But — Walter Isaacson

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water. — Sara Sheridan

As for free will, there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention. If I had been born of Italian parents in one of the caves in the hills I would be a prostitute at the age of 12 or so because I had to live (why?) and that was the only way open. If I was born into a wealthy New York family with pseudo-cultural leanings, I would have had my coming-out party along with the rest of them, and be equipped with fur coats, social contacts, and a blase pout. How do I know? I don't; I can only guess. I wouldn't be I. But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of "I" that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratches on the paper ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I. — Sylvia Plath

Yet the personal choice to smoke is ... the same kind of choice as the driver who downed the beers, and then the telephone pole. - Open letter from the tobacco industry, 1988 — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I open doors, I close doors," he wrote. He loved no one, he loved everyone. He loved sex, he hated sex. Life is a lie, truth is a lie. His thoughts ended with a healing wound. "I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together." His manifesto as an artist. I let the confessional aspects fall away, and I accepted those words as a communion wafer. He had cast the line that would seduce me, ultimately bind us together. I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, not knowing what would happen next. — Patti Smith

He thought that when he had healed sufficiently, and withdrawn from the capital, he might write the magus a letter and open a correspondence on Euclid, or Thales, or the new idea from the north, that the sun and not the Earth might be the centre of the universe. — Megan Whalen Turner

I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read. — Rainer Maria Rilke

To The Critics

Suicide has made more than one mediocre author glorious before he's able to achieve that sobering "second edition" making his a suicide that waits until it's justified. But I've taken more precautions against to Suicide which is to survive in the face of failure. Success is mostly editing, that's what makes things nice. To edit is the other great Power; thus this novel started at age 30, continued at 50 and its 73, has finally achieve supremacy: a person of Good Taste as the third author and as a result the editor of all three. In the end I'll be the author of a letter to the critics a sort of "open letter" but for the living: suicide is not something you can edit out. — Macedonio Fernandez

The whole affair was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic. There were a lot of condomy problems that I did not get a particularly good look at. No headboards were broken. No screaming. Honestly, it was probably the longest time we'd ever spent together without talking. Only one thing followed type: Afterward, when I had my face resting against Augustus's chest, listening to his heart pound, Augustus said, "Hazel Grace, I literally cannot keep my eyes open." "Misuse of literality," I said. "No," he said. "So. Tired." His face turned away from me, my ear pressed to his chest, listening to his lungs settle into the rhythm of sleep. After a while, I got up, dressed, found the Hotel Filosoof stationery, and wrote him a love letter: — John Green

I knelt and opened up my lute case. Moving the lute aside, I pressed the lid of the secret compartment and twisted it open. I slid Threpe's sealed letter inside, where it joined the hollow horn with Nina's drawing and a small sack of dried apple I had stowed there. There was nothing special about the dried apple, but in my opinion if you have a secret compartment in your lute case and don't use it to hide things, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with you. — Patrick Rothfuss

I was a tongue, a gazette. The bearer of "the truth of the whispers."
I knew of hollowed books, trunks with false bottoms, and the meanders of secret corridors. I knew how to open hidden drawers in your escritoire, how to unseal your letter and make you think no one had touched it. If I had been in your room, I left the hair around your lock the way you had tied it. If you trusted the silence of the night, I had overheard your secrets. — Eva Stachniak

Hummingbird Suppose I say summer, write the word "hummingbird," put it in an envelope, take it down the hill to the box. When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how much, I love you. - RAYMOND CARVER — Catherine McKenzie

Gloriani showed him, in such perfect confidence, on Chad's introduction of him, a fine worn handsome face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. With — Henry James

Beauty is an open letter of recommendation that wins hearts for us in advance. — Arthur Schopenhauer

When I tell people I was in the St. Justin Martyr parish, if they are native Chicagoans they know exactly where I was and what that was like. The Sunday before this particular march, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, had required all of his pastors to read a letter in support of open housing and economic justice in every parish in the city. — Sara Paretsky

I will be on the look out for you, my dear girl," he wrote. "You must expect to give yourself up when you come." For this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itself open. — Erik Larson

Peasants seldom write letters, and for my father the arrival of a letter was an important ceremony that entailed quite a ritual: the glass of wine for the postman, the close scrutiny of his name on the envelope - mistakes can happen, and you must never open a letter that isn't addressed to you - and then the blade of the knife carefully inserted to liberate whatever the fates had in store. — Maurice Messegue

It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the Reverend Mr Dimmesdale, at noonday, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist. [In an open letter to Upton Sinclair, printed in The American Mercury, June 1936] — H.L. Mencken

The Internet is a fantastic, strange place where you can write an open letter and be reasonably assured that people are going to read it. — Chris Weitz

Mitt Romney has a fund-raiser. He's going to get in the ring and fight Evander Holyfield. This is the dumbest thing Republicans have done since they wrote that open letter to Iran. — David Letterman

Most of us do not like to look inside ourselves for the same reason we don't like to open a letter that has bad news. — Fulton J. Sheen

Petyr had been talking about mathematics again, boring everyone, when her mother looked up from her plate with a smile and announced that Julie had written a letter to say she'd quit the family. Clarissa's mouth had dropped open. It was like saying that the sun had decided to become a politician or that four had decided to be eight. It wasn't quite incomprehensible, but it lived on the edge. — James S.A. Corey

The door of the jail being flung open, the young woman stood fully revealed before the crowd. It seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom that she might conceal a certain token which was wrought or fastened to her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush and yet a haughty smile, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

We don't claim perfection; even the best journalism is but a first draft of history. But we bring to the challenge certain basic beliefs that aren't much in fashion these days. We believe facts are facts and that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting. We thus believe that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral. News, in short, is not merely a matter of views. And truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.
[Letter From the Publisher: A Report to The Wall Street Journal's Readers, 12 January, 1993] — Peter R. Kann

Cassia had a feeling Kane might not follow her instructions to the letter, but she never expected him to come barreling into the docking lot with Arabelle hoisted over one shoulder, shielding his head with his free arm and yelling like his pants were on fire. Behind him, Doran and Solara ran through the open doorway, each armed with a stolen pulse pistol and firing indiscriminately at someone out of view.
So much for smooth negotiating. — Melissa Landers

Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word ad immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the the beautiful room is empty. Franz Kafka (in a letter to Milena Jesenska) — Edmund White

Diversity is a very popular business topic today while the negative side of diversity, discrimination, remains a touchy and sensitive topic. Even in organisations which follow the letter of the law in terms of not discriminating against any individuals, it is common for people to show prejudice and bias...Have the courage to stand out from your colleagues by being very open to and comfortable with all kinds of diversity amongst your colleagues and stakeholders. When you sense someone is being ignored or marginalized spend time with them and bring them into discussions encouraging them to speak up as needed. — Nigel Cumberland

A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the-surely not always strong-hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem. — Paul Celan

The open letter has always been an interesting rhetorical strategy - a way of delivering a pointed message to a specific individual or group while also reaching a wide audience. — Roxane Gay

One of my pet irritations today is the whole idea that the great interest and upsurge in books about black life has just come along. 1937 and 1938 were the years when the interest in this whole subject was born.

from "Guidelines for Black Books: An Open Letter to Juvenile Editors" (1969) in Children and Literature (1973) — Augusta Baker

Ah yes, the facts. I've spent my whole life running after them, convinced that if I found demonstrable, incontrovertible facts I would also find some kind of truth. Now aged sixty-three, faced with this war which has only just begun and with an unsettling premonition of what is soon to follow, I'm beginning to think the facts are just a front and that the truth they mask is at best like a Russian doll: as soon as you open it up you find a smaller one inside, then another which is even smaller, then another and another, till finally all you are left with is something the size of a grain.
Letters against the war: Letter from Quetta, 2011. — Tiziano Terzani

I recognized Meg's swirly handwriting and crooked my index finger into the side of the envelope to rip it open. There was no letter. Just a picture.
A picture of Meg holding a picture of me.
The word HOME echoed through my body like a rifle shot. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Ann Coulter is, at this point, a known quantity (especially after the raghead remarks last year), and she delivered what they knew she would deliver. Where were the complaints in advance of her appearance? There were none that I am aware of, and this is just damage control. An open letter isn't going to solve the real problem with the conservative movement. And hell, the authors can't even write this letter without sniping at liberal websites. Ann Coulter is not the problem - she is a symptom of the problem. — John Cole

Best putdown of a copy editor ever award goes to Raymond Chandler, who, in a 1947 letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote: By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. — Raymond Chandler

Everyday, the mail brings the thousands of letters, and you hand over to Me personally hundreds more. Yet, I do not take the help of anyone else, even to open the envelopes. For, you write to me intimate details of your personal problems, believing that I alone will read them and having implicit confidence in Me. You write, each one only a single letter, that makes for Me a huge bundle a day; and I have to go through all of them. You may ask how I manage it? Well I do not waste a single moment. — Sathya Sai Baba

Having completed its conquest of California in 1844, the United States looked across the Pacific for new business opportunities. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo (then called Edo) Bay with four men-of-war, and handed over a letter for the Japanese emperor from the American president which began with the ominous words, 'You know that the United States of America now extend from sea to sea.' Denied an audience with the emperor, Perry retreated with subtle threats to return with more firepower if the Japanese did not agree to open their ports to American trade. They refused. He did as he said; and the Japanese succumbed. — Pankaj Mishra

How time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see. — Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter Crooked Letter

It is the sort of book that has to be rested on a table or a lectern; it is not easy to lift a volume one-handed, and only a basketball player would be able to hold it up and open with a single hand. With its pages spread, it is almost twenty inches wide, and the pages are a foot and half in length; stacked, the four volumes make a pile nearly ten inches high. Johnson's finished tome was stately in appearance - 'Vasta mole superbus' ('Proud in its great bulk'), as he beamingly described it in a letter to Thomas Warton.1 — Henry Hitchings

It would be easy to assume that the open letter is a symptom of the Internet age. Such is not the case. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Great Britain, Lord North - a satirical call for the imposition of martial law in the colonies. — Roxane Gay

open me carefully — Emily Dickinson

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully. — Siri Hustvedt

( ... ) rest content and satisfied that as you are caught in the noose of love it is one of worth and merit that has taken you, and one that has not only the the four S's that they say true lovers ought to have, but a complete alphabet; only listen to me and you will see how I can repeat it by rote. He is to my eyes and thinking, Amiable, Brave, Courteous, Distinguished, Elegant, Fond, Gay, Honorable, Illustrious, Loyal, Manly, Noble, Open, Polite, Quickwitted, Rich, and the S's according to the saying, and then Tender, Veracious: X does not suite him, for it is a rough letter; Y has been given already; and Z Zealous for your honour. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

I've translated two of Bae's novels, A Greater Music and Recitation, which are coming from Open Letter and Deep Vellum in October and January respectively. A Greater Music is a semi-autobiographical book centred on a Korean writer moving to Berlin, learning to live and even write in a foreign language. — Deborah Smith

A letter from Jonathon Binns, a medical expert, written in 1772, advised the mother of a baby to "give him a little red or white wine every day. He may at different times take about one glass; but be very cautious of it if his eyes be somewhat sore and inflamed. Red port is preferable to white, provided he is sufficiently open in his belly."3 — Janet Gleeson

When the bomb doors are open and you're flying straight and steady over battery upon battery of radar guided guns with ten thousand pounds of explosives and two thousand gallons of high octane petrol exposed under your seat it feels like you're dangling a piece of raw red meat to a great white shark. That's how he once described the bomb run in a letter to his father. — Glenn Haybittle

Those who marry God can become domesticated too - it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word Love means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and Ave Maria like dearest is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves - it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night. — Graham Greene

Scriptures are Letters from Home. Can you imagine getting a letter from home and not even bothering to open it? — Ardeth Kapp

Amy Winehouse's mother wrote an open letter to the News of the World newspaper telling Amy she's worried about her and to please call her. I doubt this is the best way to communicate with Amy - she should try spelling it out in lines of cocaine. — Chelsea Handler

I know that I'll move on, I tell myself I'll find me something better
I'll let go and just forget her
She was no good for me
Deep down I know that's the way it has to be so
How come I still can't open this letter
I can't forget her... — James Morrison

He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It's hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: "His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory" (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB). — Ann Voskamp

I wish all those involved in the Wikileaks matter in the spirit of truth (rather than as a cheap opportunity to screw with a .gov they dislike) the very best. I hope that they'll bear in mind that truth is not some pure thing that brings light and scatters rose petals wherever it goes. It can hurt people that don't deserve to be hurt. It has thorns. Treat it gently.
(From an open letter.) — Adrian Lamo