Quotes by Essayists - Page 102

I believe there is dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low.
Marilynne Robinson
The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.
Dejan Stojanovic
Vultures are the most righteous of birds: they do not attack even the smallest living creature.
Plutarch
But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.
Virginia Woolf
Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.
Marilynne Robinson
The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.
Barbara Kingsolver
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
Marilynne Robinson
Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Charles Baudelaire
The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.
Barbara Kingsolver
All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all the way to a caravan in Hollywood and, for a moment, when he had got as far away from school and reality as it was possible to go, he was reasonably happy; then it would begin the return journey, thump him on the head, and leave him in exactly the place he had started from. And all the time it got nearer and nearer to the morning.
Nick Hornby
Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.
Marilynne Robinson
The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to c
Jane Hirshfield
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
Virginia Woolf
I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.
Jorge Luis Borges
Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, self-reflection reveals that this connected unity is the ultimate reality that can be reached. "Consciousness cannot go behind itself." Whatever we propose to think forms part of this organic unity of our mind and is a result or consequence of it. There is no means of jumping beyond consciousness, and any attempt to explain with the help of any other imaginary system the radical connectedness in which we live and that is our mind would be absurd. Our mind is the very presupposition of all explanation. For to explain a phenomenon means, in the last instance, to point out its place and its part within the living economy of consciousness, and to determine the "meaning" it has in the original source of all meaning: life.
José Ortega y Gasset
Happiness comes most to persons who seek it least and think least about it. It is not an object to be sought it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It must overtake you and not you overtake it.
John Burroughs
...you look at me like an emergency
Adrienne Rich
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.
William Styron
Standing DeerAs the house of a personin age sometimes grows clutteredwith what istoo loved or too heavy to part with,the heart may grow cluttered.And still the house will be emptied,and still the heart.As the thoughts of a personin age sometimes grow sparer,like the great cleanness come into a room, the soul may grow sparer;one sparrow song carves it completely.And still the room is full,and still the heart.Empty and filled,like the curling half-light of morning,in which everything is still possible and so why not.Filled and empty,like the curling half-light of evening,in which everything now is finished and so why not.Beloved, what can be, what was,will be taken from us.I have disappointed.I am sorry. I knew no better.A root seeks water.Tenderness only breaks open the earth.This morning, out the window,the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.
Jane Hirshfield
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong.
Thomas Carlyle
All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
Thomas Carlyle
I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.
Jorge Luis Borges
I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely.
Arthur Miller
Between world and animal are fewer questions than between man and world. How many such questions are there in God's Word?
Sorin Cerin
There is no sin in the realm of taste.
Steve Almond
Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
Roland Barthes
What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
Salman Rushdie
So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball
Virginia Woolf
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
Walt Whitman
What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.
Adam Gopnik
The world belongs to the energetic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
Barbara Kingsolver
A mind stretched by a new ideanever shrinks back to its original proportions. ~
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]
William Matthews
Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And now she was thinking of her own death, with her heart gripped not by fear but by the excitement of a great discovery, the feeling that she was about to learn what she had been unable to learn from her brief experience of love. What she thought about death was childish, but what could never have touched her in the past now filled her with poignant tenderness, as sometimes a familiar face we see suddenly with the eyes of love makes us aware that it has been dearer to us than life itself for longer than we have ever realized.
Georges Bernanos
Nobody will ever be able to understand the meaning of the measure of his own words.
Sorin Cerin
... the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.
Chuck Klosterman
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
Plutarch
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George Santayana
Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.
Chuck Klosterman
I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.
Georges Duhamel
Life stand still here.
Virginia Woolf
Written words can also sing.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
The Government finally decidedTo wage the war all-out. Defeat is Un-American. And they took to the air,Their women beside themin bouffant hairdosputting nail-polish on thegunship cannon-buttons.And they never came downfor they found,the groundis Pro-Communist. And dirty.And the insects side with the Viet Cong.
Gary Snyder
I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway less burdened.
Flannery O'Connor
Paul gives us an astonishing understanding of waiting in the New Testament book of Romans, as rendered by Eugene Peterson, 'Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.' With such motivation, we can wait as we sense God is indeed with us, and at work within us, as he was with Mary as the child within her grew.
Luci Shaw
The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
Edward Abbey
Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger?
Barbara Kingsolver
I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.
Mark Slouka
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
E B White
New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up
E B White
Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious. . . . Space is, after all, solid, monolithic. . . . Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature.
Stanisław Lem
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
Virginia Woolf
The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one's curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present world.
Phillip Lopate
He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.
Danzy Senna
Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
John Ralston Saul
Life is a luminous halo a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.
Virginia Woolf
As everyone knows, there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying
E B White