It was pleasant to me to get ...

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.
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 Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Quotes from the same author

The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
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 Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The ability to have our own way, and at the same time convince others they are having their own way, is a rare thing among men. Among women it is as common as eyebrows.
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 Thomas Bailey Aldrich
My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.
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 Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild motley throng, men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav. Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn, these bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Ttose, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws in street and alley. What strange tongues are loud accents of menace alien to our air, voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?
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 Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.
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 Thomas Bailey Aldrich