J.R.R. Tolkien received this letter in March 1956:

Dear Sir

I hope you do not mind my writing to you, but with reference to your story ‘Lord of the Rings’ running as a serial on the radio under the item on the programme ‘for the schools’ Home Service once a week in the afternoons I was rather interested in how you arrived at the name of one of the characters named Sam Gamgee because that happens to be my name. I haven’t heard the story myself not having a wireless but I know some who have, one being my nephew, bearing the same surname, who is a school teacher and it caused a laugh among his class when it came on. Another, my great neice and the latter’s daughter 9 yrs of age a pupil at a different school, also heard it and caused some surprise among the class when it came on at her school. I know it’s fiction, but it is rather a coincidence as the name is very uncommon, but well known in the medical profession.

The above address is my brothers as I have no permanent address.

Yrs faithfully

Sam Gamgee

Tolkien wrote back, “It was very kind of you to write. You can imagine my astonishment, when I saw your signature! I can only say, for your comfort I hope, that the ‘Sam Gamgee’ of my story is a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers, even though his origins are rustic. So that perhaps you will not be displeased by the coincidence of the name of this imaginary character (of supposedly many centuries ago) being the same as yours.”

He later said, “For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed ‘S. Gollum’. That would have been more difficult to deal with.”

A gracious moment between Samuel Johnson and the actress Sarah Siddons:

When Mrs. Siddons came into the room, there happened to be no chair ready for her, which he observing, said with a smile, ‘Madam, you who so often occasion a want of seats to other people, will the more easily excuse the want of one yourself.’

(From Boswell’s Life of Johnson.)

Alexander Woollcott once encountered artist Neysa McMein at a party where she was dressed in a gown hung with spangles.

“Why, Neysa,” he said, “you’re scrofulous with mica.”

A fundamental belief about time is that the future is open while the past is set. But in Emmanuel Carrère’s 1986 novel La Moustache, the main character shaves off his mustache one day only to find that his wife and coworkers don’t react: Reality has twisted so that he has never had a mustache.

As the novel continues, other pieces of his personal history change one by one, as if his life is being replaced by another one. Finally even facts that have been described in earlier chapters begin to change. The hero flees to Macao, where he knows no one and has no history. But his wife is in the room there, and she shows no surprise at seeing him.

“This suggests that the hero has not been taken to Macao by the events reported in the preceding chapters,” writes Marie-Laure Ryan, “but that he is there as a tourist on a completely normal family vacation. At this point the novel becomes a self-destructing artifact that denies what is generally considered to be the main function of narrative: its ability to tell about and to preserve the past.”

(Marie-Laure Ryan, “Impossible Worlds and Aesthetic Illusion,” in Werner Wolf, et al., Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media, 2013.)

From Roland Barthes’ 1975 autobiography:

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a ‘nose’ make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.

Mark Twain sent this letter to his wife and daughters from Montreal on Nov. 27, 1881. What does it mean?

A letter from William Cullen Bryant to his mother, Jan. 16, 1821:

Dear Mother:

I hasten to communicate to you the melancholy intelligence of what has lately happened to me.

Early in the evening of the eleventh day of the present month, I was at a neighbouring house in this village. Several people of both sexes assembled in one of the apartments — three or four others, together with myself were in another. At last came a little elderly gentleman, pale, thin, with a solemn countenance, a pleuritic voice, hooked nose, and hollow eyes. Presently we were summoned to attend in the room where he and the rest of the company were assembled. We went in, and took our seats; the little elderly gentleman with the hooked nose then prayed, and we all stood up. When he had finished, most of us sat down. The little elderly gentleman with the hooked nose then asked those who remained standing for something which he called a certificate … A paper was accordingly produced, inscribed with certain significant characters, upon which having mused a little while, he turned to us and pronounced several cabalistical expressions, which I was too much frightened to remember — but I recollect very well, that, at the conclusion, I was given to understand that I was married to a young lady of the name of Frances Fairchild, whom I perceived standing by my side, and whom I hope, in the course of the next few months, to have the pleasure of introducing to you as your daughter-in-law; which is a matter of some interest to the poor girl who has neither father nor mother in the world. …

I looked only for goodness of heart, an ingenuous and affectionate disposition, a good understanding &c. &c., and the character of my wife is too frank and single-hearted to suffer me to suppose the possibility of my being disappointed. — I misstate the matter — I did not look for these, nor any qualities — but they trapped me before I was aware, and now I am married in spite of myself. When we shall begin to keep house will depend, as everything else does, altogether upon circumstances.

Thus the current of destiny carries us all along. None but a madman would swim against the stream, and none but a fool would exert himself to swim with it. The best way is to float idly with the tide. …

Your affectionate son

W.C. Bryant