Quotes & Sayings About Telegrams

I just told Max flatly, "I had laser surgery last week to lighten my birthmark," as if it was no big deal.
Oh yeah?" he said. Unexpectedly, Max swiveled around, yanked his pants down.
The last thing I thought I had wanted to see tonight was Merc walking out the door. I was wrong. It was this stranger's rear end. "Please don't tell me this is one of those stripping telegrams? — Justina Chen

We found letters at the house we bought from a sailor to his wife who lived in the house. He went down to the Caribbean on this trader vessel, bringing down salted fish. There would be handwritten letters, but also telegrams, saying which ports he was in. And he'd be gone for three months. That was just the way it is. — Michael Winter

Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I'm in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger. — E. M. Forster

History was indeed controlled by blind forces, as well as character and courage and treachery and love. And accident and random chance. And stray bullets and telegrams and tips. And cats. — Connie Willis

Well, I know that I'll never forget that, but also I won't forget the hundreds of people who sent me letters, telegrams, and postcards during that World Series. There wasn't a single nasty message. Everybody tried to say something nice. — Gil Hodges

A girl who could send tear-stained telegrams. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Tolya answered their questions and he puffed up those men with the notion they were doing good, embroidering their task with a lot of long words like dedication and sacrifice that reminded me of those odd telegrams from the Almighty that would burst into our silent worship at home.
I don't trust those words or the people that use them. Maybe I'm simple, but they ring in my ears with the same dull thud you get when a stone bangs against an empty coffee can ... where Tolya said he saw holy men preserving the lost jewels of human knowledge, all I saw was a team of burglars getting ready to shoot their accomplices. — Marcel Theroux

Ask the first lion cub you meet, and it will tell you that, once you've tasted blood, there is no pulling up, and it's the same with opening telegrams. — P.G. Wodehouse

Hitler didn't snub me - it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram. — Jesse Owens

Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters. — Agnes Repplier

After that, we had a short conversation about how your body can sometimes seem totally separate. She said her body can feel like a distant bureaucracy controlled by telegrams from her brain, and I said my body is sometimes like that of Mario Mario, being controlled with a Nintendo joypad. Mario's surname is Mario. — Joe Dunthorne

They are lovely pigeons to look at and their eyes are full of lessons to learn.."
They came back yesterday, they came back home," was the answer. "They came back limping on their feet with their toes turned in so far they nearly turned backward.
Every day the last six days I get a telegram, six telegrams from six pigeons
and at last they come home. — Carl Sandburg

Gather up your telegrams
Your faded pictures, best laid plans
Books and postcards, 45's
Every sunset in the sky
Carry with you maps and string, flashlights
Friends who make you sing
And stars to help you find your place
Music, hope and amazing grace
Maybe what we leave
Is nothing but a tangled little mystery
Maybe what we take
Is nothing that has ever had a name — Mary Chapin Carpenter

Episode 5: Meanwhile, they'd all lost touch, because they didn't have Facebook and phones were expensive or whatever. (You do have to feel sorry for the older generation. I mean, all this "pay phones" and "telegrams" and "airmail." How did they cope?) — Sophie Kinsella

When I was 13, I worked for Western Union. When the telegrams came in, I would glue them on the paper and deliver them on my bicycle. — Francis Ford Coppola

Traditionally, diplomacy was done in an environment of information scarcity. Ambassadors would send back telegrams to foreign ministries, comfortable in the knowledge that their views of a country would be the only source of information the minister would see. — Douglas Alexander

Show me the telegrams they sent you, one every day for six days while they were walking six hundred miles on their pigeon toes."
..
1. Feet are as good as wings if you have to. Chickamauga ...
3. In the night sleeping you forget whether you have wings or feet or neither. Chattahoochee ...
6. Pity me. Far is far. Near is near. and there is no place like home when the yellow roses climb up the ladders and sing in the early summer. Pity me. Wednesday Evening In The Twilight And The Gloaming.
..
Well, Wednesday Evening was the only one I noticed making any mention of the yellow roses in her telegram," Hatrack the Horse explained.
Then the old man and the girl sat on the cracker box saying nothing, only listening to the yellow roses all on fire with early summer climbing up th ecrooked ladders, up and down and crossways, some of them leaning out and curving and nearly falling. — Carl Sandburg

The first of the telegrams arrived shortly after noon, and Jeeves brought it in with the before-luncheon snifter. It was from Aunt Dahlia, operating from Market Snodsbury, a small town of sorts a mile or two along the main road as it leaves her country seat.
It ran as follows:

Come at once. Travers.

And when I say it puzzled me like the dickens, I am understating it, if anything. As mysterious a communication, I considered, as was ever flashed over the wires. I studied it in a profound reverie for the best part of two dry Martinis and a dividend. I read it backwards. I read it forwards. As a matter of fact, I have a sort of recollection of even smelling it. But it still baffled me. — P.G. Wodehouse

Thirty-one days later, in the summer of 1981, he became a full-time writer, and the feeling of liberation as he left the agency for the last time was heady and exhilarating. He shed advertising like an unwanted skin, though he continued to take a sneaky pride in his bestknown slogan, "Naughty but nice" (created for the Fresh Cream Cake Client), and in his "bubble words" campaign for Aero chocolate (IRRESISTIBUBBLE, DELECTABUBBLE, ADORABUBBLE, the billboards cried, and bus sides read TRANSPORTABUBBLE, trade advertising said PROFITABUBBLE, and storefront decals proclaimed AVAILABUBBLE HERE). Later that year, when Midnight's Children was awarded the Booker Prize, the first telegram he received - there were these communications called "telegrams" in those days - was from his formerly puzzled boss. "Congratulations," it read. "One of us made it. — Salman Rushdie

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers. — Emil Cioran

It is important that people support prisoners of the Italian state like Joe in whatever way they can. I was not allowed contact with a lawyer for the first 24 hours, and no phone calls were permitted, but apparently telegrams have been getting through to Joe. — John Blair

Names came patterning into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference. — Sebastian Faulks

The National Security Agency's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back. — Frank Church

Experience has taught me," said Peter ( ... ) "that no situation finds Bunter unprepared. That he should have procured The Times this morning by the simple expedient of asking the milkman to request the postmistress to telephone to Broxford and have it handed to the 'bus-conductor to be dropped at the post-office and brought up by the little girl who delivers the telegrams is a trifling example of his resourceful energy. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Nineteen fourteen was just flags and new-smelling leather on uniforms. It wasn't until a year later that life started to feel different - started to feel as if maybe this wasn't a sideshow after all - when, instead of getting back their precious, strapping husbands and sons, the women began to get telegrams. These bits of paper which could fall from stunned hands and blow about in the knife-sharp wind, which told you that the boy you'd suckled, bathed, scolded and cried over, was - well - wasn't. Partageuse joined the world late and in a painful labor. — M.L. Stedman

We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same place, are all quite natural. A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with an obstinacy equalled only by our good faith, springs from an original mistake in our premises. — Marcel Proust

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union. — Edward Albee

I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead. — Katherine Mansfield

You know, this always happens. Whenever I go away, I always think I'll come back to mountains of exciting posts, with parcels and telegrams and letters full of scintillating news - and I'm always disappointed. In fact, I really think someone should set up a company called holidaypost which you would pay to write you loads of exciting letters, just so you had something to look forward to when you got home. — Sophie Kinsella

Without the letters of condolence, telegrams of congratulations, and occasional postcards, the friendship of a separated friend is not a social reality. It has no existence without the rites of friendship. Social rituals create a reality which would be nothing without them. It is not too much to say that ritual is more to society than words are to thought. For it is very possible to know something and then find words for it. But it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts. — Mary Douglas

As it happened, their father had not had to spend very much time worrying. He had received telegrams from both sons, telling him each was looking for the other. The telegrams, Leslie later learned, had arrived five minutes apart, "so that father knew at home that we were both safe before we did. — Erik Larson

I opened the telegram and said, 'He's dead. — Nadine Gordimer

Her mother was a streetwalking flaghopper and her father escaped from a lunatic asylum with bunions on his balls and warts on his wank. There is laughing along the bench and Miss Barry calls to us, I warned ye against the laughing. Mackey, what is it you're prattling about over there? I said we'd all be better off out in the fresh air on this fine day delivering telegrams, Miss Barry. I'm sure you did, Mackey. Your mouth is a lavatory. Did you hear me? I did, Miss Barry. You have been heard on the stairs, Mackey. Yes, Miss Barry. Shut up, Mackey. I will, Miss Barry. Not another word, Mackey. No, Miss Barry. I said shut up, Mackey. All right, Miss Barry. That's the end of it, Mackey. Don't try me. I won't, Miss Barry. Mother o' God give me patience. Yes, Miss Barry. Take the last word, Mackey. Take it, take it, take it. I will, Miss Barry. — Frank McCourt

Tweeting is like sending out cool telegrams to your friends once a week. — Tom Hanks

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer. — Alison Gopnik

All six telegrams arrive at the same place together. What happens next is that you make a choice. What will it be? Most adults know that the rational choice - in terms of health, weight, nutrition, and — Deepak Chopra

For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams - in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history! — James Gleick

And just as war is always for somebody else, so it is also true that someone else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn't true either. The dreadful telegrams began to sneak sorrowfully in, and it was everybody's brother. Here we were, over six thousand miles from the anger and the noise, and that didn't save us. — John Steinbeck

Asked what would be his idea of Heaven, one statesman in 1897 said it would be to receive a flow of telegrams alternating news of a British victory by sea and a British victory by land. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Wilson was outraged but chose not to see the declaration itself as sufficient justification for war. What he did not yet know was that there was a second, very secret message appended to the telegram Bernstorff had received and that both telegrams had been intercepted and relayed to Blinker Hall's intelligence division in the Old Admiralty Building in London, which by now oversaw a second, and singularly sensitive, component of Room 40's operations - the interception of diplomatic communications, both German and, incidentally, American. — Erik Larson

This telegram is a work of art if I say it is. — Robert Rauschenberg

I think there are telegrams that may or may not be available, which indicated that I very much had in mind the need to give Europe substantial aid after the war, after Lend-Lease was over. — W. Averell Harriman

It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed? — Jeanette Winterson

When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters, but telegrams. — Charlotte Whitton