Quotes by Essayists - Page 20

Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.
Herta Müller
The peace of the man who has foresworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace but a canting impotence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No one can read the books of Moses with any care without understanding that law can be a means of grace. Certainly this law is of one spirit with the Son of Man who says, "I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me." This kind of worldliness entails the conferring of material benefit over and above mere equity. It means a recognition of and respect for both the intimacy of God's compassion and the very tangible forms in which it finds expression.
Marilynne Robinson
Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.
Charles Lamb
To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare -- where others lack the courage-- to plunge again into the elemental.
Thomas Mann
To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.
Edward Abbey
I know too well how slowly we edge along sideways to every thing good & brilliant in our lives & how casually and unobservedly we make all our most valued acquaintances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.
Barbara Kingsolver
We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
Virginia Woolf
Character is what can do without success
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Is that all?
Dejan Stojanovic
I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.
Virginia Woolf
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
Flannery O'Connor
Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation--who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him--but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope--qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.
Bill Styron
She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, "Let me come with you," and he laughed. He meant yes or no - either perhaps. But it was not his meaning - it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her...
Virginia Woolf
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
Flannery O'Connor
Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with theintention to belong to, and share witheach other, a mystical estate; mysticalexactly in the sense that the realexperience cannot be communicated toothers, nor explained even to oneselfon rational grounds.
Katherine Anne Porter
Nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
Barbara Kingsolver
Beauty is a cheap word, but beauty remains priceless.
Dejan Stojanovic
Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory.
Dejan Stojanovic
Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about his metaphor is that is makes writing much more than a lifesaving venture.
Phyllis Theroux
No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.
Walter Savage Landor
The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.
Joseph Epstein
Certain brands of guilt can be inculcated in a secular way but other brands of guilt can only be obtained with reference to the metaphysical.
Sarah Ruhl
Goal: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams.
Gary Snyder
No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson
Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
Paul Valéry
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Four billion people on this earthbut my imagination is still the same.It's bad with large numbers.It's still taken by particularity.It flits in the dark like a flashlight,illuminating only random faceswhile all the rest go by,never coming to mind and never really missed.
Wisława Szymborska
Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H.L. Mencken
A great man stands on God. A small man stands on a great man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our real duty is always found running in the direction of our worthiest desires.
Randolph Bourne
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' gallery yonder there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.
Thomas Carlyle
If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.
John Crowley
The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.
Stephen Spender
An empty man is full of himself.
Edward Abbey
But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.
José Martí
Hope! Of all the ills that men endure the only cheap and universal cure.
Abraham Cowley
I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string
Virginia Woolf
She kept saying, "My husband will be back soon. He went for help. He'll be back." But that's the kind of lie people tell sometimes when they got only strangers to rely on. There's shame in that, so people lie.
Marilynne Robinson
The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.
Joseph Epstein
Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
William Kittredge
A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—​and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?
Leslie Jamison
Does anybody know which are the thoughts of God, even if they are plants, mountains, sky, stars or whatever else?
Sorin Cerin
I have reached this world’s dreams harbor as devoid of truth as any other soul that dreams it lives through knowledge.
Sorin Cerin
Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work.
Dejan Stojanovic
We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.
William H. Gass
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.
Jonathan Franzen
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
Barbara Kingsolver
When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed.
Dejan Stojanovic
She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
Virginia Woolf
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
Flannery O'Connor
Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.
Paul Valéry
Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.
Dejan Stojanovic
Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.
Edmund White
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
Paul Valéry