Harriet Martineau Quotes

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.

I don't think you're entitled to read my mail between my daughters and me.

We would never comment on private correspondence.

I have stacks and stacks of journals. I'll change the names if I ever decide to publish them.

I think someone's conversation, whether in e-mail or in person, should be private.

Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?

A writer should always bravely face life, risking death and mutilation in order to dethrone an emperor.

I get some letters from girls that if their mothers knew what they were writing me in these letters, they'd get their butts whipped.

I advise writing to oneself. If you don't want to read it, nobody else is going to read it.

No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.

Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

Some people drop their wings in order to grow a hump

There are probably a couple of things I'd never write about until everyone I know is dead. And then there's other stuff which nobody would want to read a book about anyway.

And it's a pity too that I've no right to open your letters. I hope you don't get many, or my conscience will give me no peace.

Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.

I cannot find a faithful message-bearer," he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. "How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.

God turns on its head one form of evil - suffering - in order to defeat another form of evil - that is, our transgressions. It happened at the cross, and it occurs in the lives of followers of Christ every day.

If it is necessary to die in order to live like men, what harm in dying?

A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

Effective leaders sacrifice much that is good in order to dedicate themselves to what is best

As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes.

The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation.

It breaks your heart when you throw something away, but it's what left that counts. It's like worrying about the bits of rock you have knocked off in order to make a beautiful statue. You've wasted half the rock, yeah, but it's the Venus di Milo!

Courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal of the most precious things.