Quotes by Essayists - Page 11

TreeIt is foolishto let a young redwoodgrow next to a house.Even in this one lifetime,you will have to choose.That great calm being,this clutter of soup pots and books--Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
Jane Hirshfield
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Charles Simic
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
Thomas Mann
I think of these desert years of mine, not of my choosing. Maybe if it were all smooth and comfortable, if my pride and professionalism were defining life for me, God's steel-quiet, penetrating word would have been lost in the babble and sheen of success.
Luci Shaw
When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I never enter a new company without the hope that I may discover a friend perhaps the friend sitting there with an expectant smile. That hope survives a thousand disappointments.
Arthur Christopher Benson
He is wise who at last sees in suffering only the light that it sheds on his soul; and whose eyes never rest on the shadow it casts upon those who have sent it towards him. And wiser still is the man to whom sorrow and joy not only bring increase of consciousness, but also the knowledge that something exists superior to consciousness even. To have reached this point is to reach the summit of inward life, whence at last we look down on the flames whose light has helped our ascent.
Maurice Maeterlinck
That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.
Nick Hornby
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
Jorge Luis Borges
When a people has no translations and is unable to promote its culture, it does not exist.
Bakhtyar Ali
The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
Hamilton Wright Mabie
Men are what their mothers made them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
Virginia Woolf
Simulant - something that doesn't exist but pretends to....Dissimulant - an object that exists but pretends not to.
Stanisław Lem
The moment that any life however good stifles you you may be sure it isn't your real life.
Arthur Christopher Benson
I think the iPod is the true face of Republican politics, and I’m in favor of the music industry … standing up proud and saying it out loud: We in the Chiclet-manufacturing business are not about social justice, …we’re not about a coherent set of national ideals, we’re not about wisdom. We’re about choosing what WE want to listen to and ignoring everything else…. We’re about giving ourselves a mindless feel-good treat every five minutes. …We’re about persuading ten-year-old children to spend twenty-five dollars on a cool little silicone iPod case that costs a licensed Apple Computer subsidiary thirty-nine cents to manufacture.
Jonathan Franzen
When once misfortune enters a house, silence is in vain.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left,You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books,You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
Walt Whitman
That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.
Anne Carson
I'd like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards and a modest human population - about 25 million would be plenty - of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting for truth), gathering once a year in the ruins of ancient, mysterious cities for great ceremonies of music, art, dance, poetry, joy, faith and renewal. That's my dream of the American future. Like most such dreams, it will probably come true. That is why I'm still an optimist.
Edward Abbey
All the queens of my acquaintance have children, some three, some seven, and some as many as twelve; and my queen has not one. I feel ill-used." So he made up his mind to be cross with his wife about it. But she bore it all like a good patient queen as she was.
Hamilton Wright Mabie
Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours.
Ben Lerner
Of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do. To find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama — a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.
William Styron
We must always have old memories and young hopes.
Arsene Houssaye
Of what avail are my loftiest thoughts if I have ceased to exist?” there are some will ask; to whom others, it may be, will answer, “What becomes of myself if all that I love in my heart and my spirit must die, that my life may be saved?” And are not almost all the morals, and heroism, and virtue of man summed up in that single choice?
Maurice Maeterlinck
Poetry": What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within.
Ben Lerner
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye the more light you pour upon it the more it will contract.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Virginia Woolf
The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Virginia Woolf
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether be a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry therefore we will call Musical Thought.
Thomas Carlyle
She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.
Rachel Cusk
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Thomas Mann
She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything
Nick Hornby
Imitation is suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machines-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student's in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.
David Foster Wallace
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
Edward Abbey
Democracy is a festival of mediocrity.
E. M. Cioran
Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The leaves of hopes which have destined words in the body of the thought have settled to the ground. This is the world.
Sorin Cerin
For each new morning with its light,For rest and shelter of the night,For health and food, for love and friends,For everything Thy goodness sends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.
Siri Hustvedt
There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
Marilynne Robinson
We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.
David Foster Wallace
Song of myselfWith music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I beat and pound for the dead, I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
Walt Whitman
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
Jorge Luis Borges
And it is because we all of us know of this sombre power and its perilous manifestations, that we stand in so deep a dread of silence. We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation: but the silence of many - silence multiplied - and above all the silence of a crowd - these are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the mightiest soul.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
Barbara Kingsolver
Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
Siri Hustvedt
It has never been given to a man to attain at once his happiness and his salvation.
Charles Péguy
All the stars in the sky cannot worth as much as yours only because it belongs to you.
Sorin Cerin
Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as - and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be - lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason or even to go on living, before they were 'saved.
David Foster Wallace
The god of Victory is said to be one-handed, but Peace gives victory to both sides.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?
Siri Hustvedt
Man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other.
Charles Lamb
Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. Christian Bovee A little praise Goes a great ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
Gary Snyder