“It’s not easy to start over in a new place,′ he said. ‘Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”
“Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world. ”
“But myself is not listening. She refuses to listen. She’s picking up another letter and another and another, frantically looking for a different answer.”
“Then one day (it happened to be the Fourth of July), a most uncommon-looking delivery boy rode around town slipping letters under the doors of the chosen tenants-to-be. The letters were signed ‘Barney Northrup’. The delivery boy was sixty-two years old, and there was no such person as Barney Northup.”
“She took off Marc’s mosquito-proof armor.
She unfastened his mountain climbing equipment.
She ripped up the letters to the moon and the mean wind.
She sent the duck off to take a bath.
She took away the traps and the sticks.”
″‘Hello, Mr. Popper, up there in Stillwater. Thanks for your nice letter about the pictures of our last expedition. Watch for an answer. But not by letter, Mr. Popper. Watch for a surprise.‘”
“I know all the twenty-six letters like that through to Z is for Zebra. I know them all well. So not I know everything anyone knows from beginning to end. From the start to the close. Because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.”
“You can stop, if you want, with the Z because most people stop with Z. But not me! In the places I go there are things that I see that I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.”
“Pat is the Greensdale postman. Every day he drives his red van up the valley. Twisting along the twining roads, up and over the hills, far away; down narrow lanes and tracks to farms and cottages. He brings letters and cards; newspapers and magazines; football-pools and catalogs and bills and birthday-cards and parcels full of who-knows-what? He also brings a smile, a joke, a chat; news of the valley and who’s-doing what. He has a little black cat, called Jess.”
“They all began the same way: Dear Nobody. I sat there feeling bleak, with a growing kind of grief in me. Once she and I were the most important people in our world. Is this what I’d become to her? Nobody?”
″‘Then show us a P, Mister Jones, and then show us a Q, and I’ll try to mind ‘em!’ For the thought had occurred to Smith that two letters would be a fair start to the day’s work of learning to read.”
“What a day it was! There was so many letters to be read, so many of the world’s doings to be caught up with. That night as they sat about the fire, even nuts and candle lighters were forgotten.”
“I squirmed at the memory and hoped that Ann wouldn’t remember and laugh. Well, at least I could write. I knew I couldn’t expect letters from Ann. Letters rate to Earth were crippling _ so was the cost of everything that had to make the 240,000 mile haul.”
I’ve got your letters, and if you give me any pertness I’ll send them to your father. I presume you grew weary of the amusement and dropped it, didn’t you? Well, you dropped Linton with it into a Slough of Despond. He was in earnest: in love, really. As true as I live, he’s dying for you; breaking his heart at your fickleness: not figuratively, but actually.