"even the ink would carry sadness and influenza"

I'm reading The Life of Dylan Thomas, (1965) by Constantine FitzGibbon. It's okay. Anyway, it has good bits. I love learning, for instance, that Thomas regularly borrowed clean clothes from his friends and never returned them. 
Mostly, though, the book makes me want to read more of Thomas's letters to his wife, Caitlin.

Here's a bit from a letter he wrote to Caitlin soon after meeting her. He'd fallen for her instantly and forever (well, for the 17-some years he was with her before he died).

Here, she was in the hospital:

"Nice, lovely, faraway Caitlin my darling,

"Are you better, and please God aren't too miserable in the horrible hospital? Tell me everything, when you'll be out again, where you'll be at Christmas, and that you think of me and love me. And when you're in the world again, we'll both be useful if you like, trot around, do things, compromise with the They people, find a place with a bath and no bugs in Bloomsbury, and be happy there.

...

"I don't want you for a day (though I'd sell my toes to see you now my dear, only for a minute, to kiss you once, and make a funny face at you): a day is the length of a gnat's life: I want you for the lifetime of a big, mad animal, like an elephant.

I've been indoors all this week, with a wicked cold, coughing and snivelling, too full of phlegm and aspirins to write to a girl in hospital, because my letter would be sad and despairing, and even the ink would carry sadness and influenza.

...

"There is, I suppose, in the eyes of the They, a sort of sweet madness about you and me, a sort of mad bewilderment and astonishment oblivious to the Nasties and the Meanies; you're the only person, of course, you're the only person from here to Aldebaran and back, with whom I'm free entirely; and I think it's because you're as innocent as me.

Oh I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics....

... But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't..."

"I'd sell my toes..."!