Thomas Bailey Aldrich Thinking Quotations

It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty .... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever - unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death— We die whene'er we think of it!

So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.