A Quote by Dana Gioia

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Dana Gioia

Quote Topics

Always Conceal Confide Dare Dead Letters More Our Than Think Write

Quote Author

Dana Gioia
American - Poet
Born: December 24, 1950

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Emil Cioran

A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

Alice Steinbach

O ay, letters - I had letters - I am persecuted with letters - I hate letters - nobody knows how to write letters; and yet one has 'em, one does not know why - they serve one to pin up one's hair.

William Congreve

I realized how valuable the art and practice of writing letters are, and how important it is to remind people of what a treasure letters--handwritten letters--can be. In our throwaway era of quick phone calls, faxes, and email, it's all to easy never to find the time to write letters. That's a great pity--for historians and the rest of us.

Nancy Reagan

If rich, it is easy enough to conceal our wealth; but, if poor, it is not quite so easy to conceal our poverty. We shall find that it is less difficult to hide a thousand guineas, than one hole in our coat.

Charles Caleb Colton

The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write.

Douglas Adams

People write me letters and say I should answer them. But I don't like to answer letters. I don't write letters. I've never written my mother one.

Todd Rundgren

Dare to be what you ought to be, dare to be what you dream to be, dare to be the finest you can be. The more you dare, the surer you will be of gaining just what you dare!

Norman Vincent Peale

I think I've never left my house to take a plane without writing my will. There must be about 30 wills in my drawers, everywhere, in the kitchen. Everywhere, I have wills because I write wills more easily than I write love letters.

Sophie Calle

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

John Cheever

People would write me hate letters. How dare I try to represent Hispanics when I was so white? I tried to make them see it was racism.

Cristina Saralegui

Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.

Joyce Brothers

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

Michael Ignatieff

Most open letters undoubtedly come from a good place, rising out of genuine outrage or concern or care. There is, admittedly, also a smugness to most open letters: a sense that we, as the writers of such letters, know better than those to whom the letters are addressed. We will impart our opinions to you, with or without your consent.