[Turtle91]

There are multiple tags you could use for that, blockquote or div are two and you can set the styling in your css to make either one look exactly the same. The only real difference is semantics... is the section a long quote where you might have some kind of citation of the author, or is it a section of text that you want to show differently? The first would use the blockquote, pretty much everything else would use a div...unless it was something specific like a list.

When I am presenting something as a "letter", which would typically be hand-written, I get a little fancy and change the font as well - embedding a "Monotype Corsiva" font to the ePub. Some devices don't do well with embedded fonts so make sure you have some kind of fall-back:

CSS:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Monotype Corsiva';
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: italic;
    src: url('../Fonts/MTCORSVA.TTF');
}

div.letter {
  margin: 2em 0 2em 1em;
}

div.letter p {
  font-size: 0.85em;
  font-family: "Monotype Corsiva", "cursive", serif;
  font-style: italic;
  text-indent: 0;
  margin-top: .75em;
}


div.letter p.signature {
  text-align: right;
  margin-right: 1em;
}

HTML:

<p>Some normal paragraph.</p>
<p>Some normal paragraph.</p>
<p>Some normal paragraph.</p>

<div class="letter">
  <p>A paragraph in the letter.</p>
  <p>A paragraph in the letter.</p>
  <p>A paragraph in the letter.</p>
  <p class="signature">Respectfully,<br/>Dion</p>
</div>

<p>Some normal paragraph.</p>
<p>Some normal paragraph.</p>
<p>Some normal paragraph.</p>

Obviously you can style the letter however you wish...

I would, however, also recommend NOT using
<p class="text">
for all your normal paragraphs... simply use the bare <p> tag (with styling in your css like: p {yadda yadda} )...then when you use a class for those special paragraphs it makes it stand out a little more...and it keeps your html nice and clean.