One of the best sites on the whole damn internet is Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note, a collection of letters ranging from the wise to the witty, the mad to the moving. Among the selection of over 700 letters are words of advice from fathers to their sons, from presidents to their people and from the successful to the aspiring. There are also full throttled rants at injustices, real or imagined, exquisitely sly slices of humour and full blown explosions of charm. All, as the site’s strapline says, ‘correspondence deserving of a greater audience’.

A good example is this brief note from Kurt Vonnegut to a young widow who, at the time, was struggling to raise three young children. Vonnegut’s books had brought her great pleasure and she decided to write and thank him. She received this wonderful reply:

“It can’t be said often enough, ‘It is the woman who pays.’ The miracle is that so many can and do somehow. I was in love (still am) with a widow with four kids (two not her own). She somehow raised them all on a teeny weeny salary. I told her one time, ‘I worry about women.’  She said, ‘Don’t.’

Cheers

Kurt Vonnegut”

 

A Letters of Note book is expected later in the year and can be pre-ordered here.