'All letters, old and new, are the still exciting parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth - or perhaps untruth, some flash of light - is just occuring. It is clamorous with the moment's happiness or pain. To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship. What we've been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago.'
Eudora Welty in What There to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (Edited by Suzanne Marrs), p.1.
