Quotes by Essayists - Page 25

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.
Tony Judt
It's what you do that makes your soul not the other way around.
Barbara Kingsolver
In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people with their wisdom and unwisdom.
Thomas Carlyle
The breath of the mind is attention 128
Joseph Joubert
Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren’t able to kill themselves until their mood improves—spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call “completed” suicides.
Charles D'Ambrosio
An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.
Edward Abbey
If you hope for any sort of dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or radical side of politics, you must cease from silly verbal abuse. If you don't want it, then we go on as we are, fractious and impotent.
Edward Abbey
It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
Flannery O'Connor
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?
Roland Barthes
The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
Virginia Woolf
the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.
George Steiner
That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.
David Foster Wallace
Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.
Dejan Stojanovic
Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.
Thomas Carlyle
All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.This is why our educated teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic.
David Foster Wallace
Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…
Barry López
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
Arnold Bennett
Maybe I lacked coping skills. Maybe I was weak. I cared for people for no better reason than they seemed to care for me, acknowledge me. It didn’t seem so dangerous at the time.
Mark Slouka
The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and only time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known.
Virginia Woolf
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think here I will leave you. It has come to seemthere is no perfect ending.Indeed, there are infinite endings.Or perhaps, once one begins,there are only endings.
Louise Glück
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.
Nick Hornby
The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don't hold nothing back.
Flannery O'Connor
It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once, headed uptown on the 9 train, I noticed a sign posted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority advising subway riders who might become ill in the train. The sign asked that the suddenly infirm inform another passenger or get out at the next stop and approach the stationmaster. Do not, repeat, do not pull the emergency brake, the sign said, as this will only delay aid. Which was all very logical, but for the following proclamation at the bottom of the sign, something along the lines of, “If you are sick, you will not be left alone.” This strikes me as not only kind, not only comforting, but the very epitome of civilization, good government, i.e., the the crux of the societal impulse. Banding together, pooling our taxes, not just making trains, not just making trains that move underground, not just making trains that move underground with surprising efficiency at a fair price—but posting on said trains a notification of such surprising compassion and thoughtfulness. I found myself scanning the faces of my fellow passengers, hoping for fainting, obvious fevers, at the very least a sneeze so that I might offer a tissue.
Sarah Vowell
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
David Foster Wallace
When within yourself you find the road, the right road will open.
Dejan Stojanovic
Only god has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us
Emil M. Cioran
We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, thought somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish.
Marilynne Robinson
What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?
Cheryl Strayed
Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.
Virginia Woolf
Rain drops are not the ones who bring the clouds.
Sorin Cerin
Neither blame or praise yourself.
Plutarch
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
William Hazlitt
The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization -- our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity -- to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists.
John Ralston Saul
The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect.
Dejan Stojanovic
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]
Virginia Woolf
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.
Jonathan Franzen
There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later.
Dejan Stojanovic
[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.
Salman Rushdie
Do you not think, Mrs. Givings, that snow is always kind? Because it has to fall slowly, to meet the ground slowly, or the eyelash slowly— And things that meet each other slowly are kind.
Sarah Ruhl
Before a secret is told one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
Susan Griffin
If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship this pressure produces diamonds.
Tatyana Tolstaya
We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!
John Cowper Powys
Or may-be one who is puzzled at me.As if I were not puzzled at myself!
Walt Whitman
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
Charles Baudelaire
It is wisdom to believe the heart.
George Santayana
These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be.
Virginia Woolf
Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Thomas Carlyle
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors… . The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor… . How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.
Walt Whitman
the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we dream or scry his facein the liquid embers,the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?It was never the rapist:it was the brother, lost,the comrade/twin whose palmwould bear a lifeline like our own:decisive, arrowy,forked-lightning of insatiate desireIt was never the crude pestle, the blindramrod we were after:merely a fellow-creaturewith natural resources equal to our own.
Adrienne Rich
Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal
William H. Gass
The man who thinks his wife his baby his house his horse his dog and himself severely unequalled is almost sure to be a good-humored person.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them.
H.L. Mencken
None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
William Hazlitt