Post Office Quotes

“She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“In this country, two things stand first in rank: your flag and your mail. You all know what honor you pay to your flag, but you should know, also, that your mail, — just that ordinary postal card—is also important. But a postal card, or any form of mail, is not important, in that way, until you drop it through a slot in this building, and with a stamp on it, or into a mail box outdoors. Up to that instant it is but a common card, which anybody can pick up and carry off without committing a criminal act. But as soon as it is in back of this partition, or in a mail box, a magical transformation occurs; and anybody who now should willfully purloin it, or obstruct its trip in any way, will find prison doors awaiting him. What a frail thing ordinary mail is! A baby could rip it apart, but no adult is so foolish as to do it. That small stamp which you stick on it, is, you might say, a postal official, going right along with it, having it always in his sight.”
― Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby

“NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLOM OF NIT CAN STAY THESE MESENGERS ABOT THEIR DUTY”
― Terry Pratchett

“Postman’s bag is always heavy because it carries the life itself: It carries all the sorrows and all the joys, all the worries and all the hopes!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“I had come a long way from a guy who had worked in slaughterhouses, who had crossed the country with a railroad track gang, who had worked in a dog biscuit factory, who had slept on park benches, who had worked the nickel and dime jobs in a dozen cities across the nation.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The NSA may, or may not have rejected the invisible secret operative application form I never even bothered to have sent over to them. I'll never know...”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Possibile che fossi davvero idiota, dopotutto? Ero io che andavo a cercarmele, le rogne? Possibile. Era possibile che fossi davvero subnormale, che per me fosse già una fortuna riuscire a sopravvivere.”
― Charles Bukowski

“In a band all along the top of the frontage, staining the stone in greens and browns, some words had been set in letters of bronze.
"NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLO M OF NI T CAN STAY THESE MES ENGERS ABO T THEIR DUTY," Moist read aloud. "What the hell does that mean?"
"The Post Office Was Once A Proud Institution," said Mr. Pump.
"And that stuff?" Moist pointed. On a board much further down the building, in peeling paint, were the less heroic words:
DONT ARSK US ABOUT: rocks, trolls with sticks, all sorts of dragons, Mrs. Cake, huje green things with teeth, any kinds of black dogs with orange eyebrows, rains of spaniels, fog, Mrs. Cake
"I Said It Was A Proud Institution," the golem rumbled.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“Neither Deluge Nor Ice Storm Nor The Black Silence Of The Netherhells Shall Stay These Messengers About Their Sacred Buisness. Do Not Ask Us About Sabre-Tooth Tigers, Tar Pits, Big Green Things With Teeth Or The Goddess Czol.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“For three months after the United States declared war on Germany the Masses kept on assailing the jingoists, the profiteers, and the capitalists who caused the beating and deportation of strikers, the Post Office censorship, and other evils which had been loosed in the campaign to silence all critics of the war administration.”
― Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times