Dear Mother, I am getting on nicely in my work at the bank, and like it ... I want to find out something about the science of money while I am at it; it is an extraordinarily interesting subject.
The thing that I think a lot of guys need to know how to do is not take your mother's advice about honesty being the best policy. Listen to your cool, drunk uncle who tells you to lie. Those are the relationships that last.
She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman - you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us.
If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterwards act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your better judgment.
Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse.
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.