Quotes by Essayists - Page 12

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.
Adrienne Rich
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of we have a special face for each friend.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Thus must the bewildered Wanderer stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men...(The Everlasting No)
Thomas Carlyle
It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.
Virginia Woolf
A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.
Anne Fadiman
The world is a navy in an empty ocean.
Dejan Stojanovic
The wise man's ... friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people evoked as it is by many qualities.
Charles Dudley Warner
I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.
Flannery O'Connor
He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam... every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.
Salman Rushdie
For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet.
Virginia Woolf
Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.
John Burroughs
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
Roland Barthes
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.
H.L. Mencken
Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He'd tried to get the highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kabab shop on Hornsey road - nothing. He'd tried to read Nicky's thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week - nothing. It really annoyed him that the only thing he'd ever achieved through trying was something he hadn't really wanted to do that much in the first place. And anyway, since when did hitting a bird with a sandwich ever kill it? People spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic?
Nick Hornby
I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe.
Virginia Woolf
Reading is the work of the alert mind is demanding and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
E B White
If after I depart this vale you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
H.L. Mencken
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
David Foster Wallace
You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one.
Nick Hornby
The end of man is action.
Thomas Carlyle
Wherever I go, I meet myself.
Dejan Stojanovic
The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy but where are they.
Plutarch
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H.L. Mencken
He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand.
Barbara Kingsolver
Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Péguy
The purpose of college, to put this all another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn't go to school for that, but if you're going to be there anyway, then that's the most important thing to get accomplished. That is the true education: accept no substitutes. The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.
William Deresiewicz
I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
Wisława Szymborska
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.
Siri Hustvedt
Boredom is the most horrible of wolves.
Jean Giono
A journey is a dismal thing when there can be no homecoming.
Stanisław Lem
As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She wasbuoyant by nature;she wanted to travel,go to the theater, go to museums.What he wantedwas to lie on the couchwith the Timesover his face,so that death, when it came,wouldn't seem a significant change.
Louise Glück
To jump over centuries In one step is impossible. Jump too high or far, You’ll be way too late.
Dejan Stojanovic
There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate, insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor.
Marilynne Robinson
The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
Thomas Carlyle
It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.
Chuck Klosterman
The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.
Joseph Epstein
In any nation but the USA, it is taken for granted that a man of distinction, ability, wealth or power will keep a mistress and a few girlfriends on the side. Only in America, still suffering from its grotesque, hypocritical Puritan heritage, do we persist in attempting to deny and repeal a million years of basic primate biology.
Edward Abbey
Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.
Siri Hustvedt
The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato - the only good belonging to him is underground.
Thomas Overbury
A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What does "poet laureate" mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now.
Nicholson Baker
Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. It is time to acknowledge this perhaps even to learn to do it better.
Lewis Thomas
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Virginia Woolf
Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
Stephen Vizinczey
Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.
Anne Fadiman
The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.
Emil M. Cioran
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
Virginia Woolf
Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
José Ortega y Gasset
If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.
Chuck Klosterman
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
Emil M. Cioran
I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.
E B White
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
Adrienne Rich
The well of your soul will not experience the drought until in front of her will appear the moment of eternity to drink from the water of death.
Sorin Cerin
I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings
Adrienne Rich
So often I'm like, No, thanks, to all of that stuff, just give me the room to exist both in the shit and stars . . . We have to fight to be understood as being distinct and incongruent. But I think it is worth fighting for.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
I know none of Time’s cardinal pillar on which it says forever just because eternity is not Time anymore.
Sorin Cerin
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices.
Barbara Kingsolver
To spoil means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations. The young child exposed to this regime has no experience of its own limits. By reason of the removal of all external restraint, all clashing with other things, he comes actually to believe that he is the only one that exists, and gets used to not considering others, especially not considering them as superior to himself. This feeling of another's superiority could only be instilled into him by someone who, being stronger than he is, should force him to give up some desire, to restrict himself, to restrain himself. He would then have learned this fundamental discipline: "Here I end and here begins another more powerful than I am. In the world, apparently, there are two people: I myself and another superior to me.
Ortega y Gasset
As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc. That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill or any sort of situation for improvement, when the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia let you take a breath of April showers let's us reason how is the dampness in your nasal passage -- but I have had lunch in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to George Girdler Smith 'gentleman' 1799, for £150)overlooking 'the town' sitting there like the Memphite lord of all Creationwith my back -- with Dogtownover the Crown of gravelly hillIt is not bad to be pissed off
Charles Olson