Quotes by Essayists - Page 27

He could have set fire to it, the garden was dry enough, and burned it clean—privet, vines, and weeds; but he waited in his rooms through the winter instead, weeping and dreaming.
William H. Gass
Out of every fruition of success no matter what comes forth something to make a new effort necessary.
Walt Whitman
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.
Virginia Woolf
For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life if freedom fail?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How much soul can include the self-salvation of sin?
Sorin Cerin
Some people complain there are too many people on earth, Some people complain about secret societies, Some people accuse others of not being able to wake up early. Almost all people complain about something.
Dejan Stojanovic
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Jorge Luis Borges
As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.
Roland Barthes
The future is wider than vision and has no end.
Donald G. Mitchell
Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
Nick Hornby
Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.
George Santayana
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Virginia Woolf
In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.
Elizabeth Alexander
If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.
Dejan Stojanovic
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.
Barbara Kingsolver
Absolute equals nothingness.
Dejan Stojanovic
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle
But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-''Like lights in a storm-''In the midst of a hurricane,' she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind.
Virginia Woolf
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To write good poems is the secret of brevity.
Dejan Stojanovic
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Virginia Woolf
Husband and wife come to look alike at last.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.
Rachel Cusk
If you can walk you can dance. Zimbabwe saying Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle
To love makes one solitary.
Virginia Woolf
Something tells me that immortality is monstrous.
Floriano Martins
We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented.
Dejan Stojanovic
My laps-meter, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.
Walker Percy
But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.
Virginia Woolf
Writing is a struggle against silence.
Carlos Fuentes
He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.
Salman Rushdie
Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.
Roland Barthes
Cities on the ocean have a choice whether to turn their faces or their backs to the water, lining the shore either with pretty hotels and rich homes or dim warehouses, narrow streets, and greasy piers. All prairie towns turn away from the prairie, however. The huddled houses form a storm-battened island in the midst of endless space.
Joseph Bottum
Heroes are the saints of every nation.
Sorin Cerin
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
Virginia Woolf
No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
H.L. Mencken
What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?
Marilynne Robinson
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom
Charles Baudelaire
To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori...
Edward Abbey
Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh.
David Foster Wallace
The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.
Stanisław Lem
History a distillation of rumor
Thomas Carlyle
for she could never think of anything to say to Clarissa, though she liked her. She had lots of fine qualities; but they had nothing in common - she and Clarissa.
Virginia Woolf
Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think that that’s—that that’s it. That that’s the point, that that’s the goal, you know? And that’s the reason we’re here—because that’s so empty. And you as a writer know that it’s—if you as a writer think that your job is to get as many people to like your stuff and think well of you as possible … And I could, we could both, name writers that it’s pretty obvious that’s their motivation? It kills the work. Each time. That that’s maybe 50 percent of it, but it misses all the magic. And it misses, it doesn’t let you be afraid. Or it doesn’t, like, let you like make yourself be, be vulnerable. Or … nah, see, I’m not … Anyway, anyway.
David Foster Wallace
Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
Thomas Carlyle
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Virginia Woolf
[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.
Mark Strand
It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in his finished work, but when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated. What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of an abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.
Flannery O'Connor
Nu pot fi eu insumi decat daca ma inalt pana la furie sau cobor pana la descurajare: la nivelul meu obisnuit, ignor faptul ca exist.
Emil M. Cioran
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Anne Fadiman
Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority-- it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney-- for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination-- over other people.
Virginia Woolf
It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.
Elizabeth Alexander
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, stillpreparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;we could see this in one another; we had changed althoughwe never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, travelingfrom day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemedin a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purposebelieved this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain freein order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed.
Louise Glück
You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
Entering a cell, penetrating deep as a flying saucer to find a new galaxy would be an honorable task for a new scientist interested more in the inner state of the soul than in outer space.
Dejan Stojanovic
Difficulties exist to be surmounted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good book should leave you....slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
William Styron
This time, something different happens, though. It’s the daydreaming that does it. I’m doing the usualthing—imagining in tiny detail the entire course of the relationship, from first kiss, to bed, to moving intogether, to getting married (in the past I have even organized the track listing of the party tapes), to howpretty she’ll look when she’s pregnant, to names of children—until suddenly I realize that there’snothing left to actually, like, happen. I’ve done it all, lived through the whole relationship in my head.I’ve watched the film on fast-forward; I know the whole plot, the ending, all the good bit. Now I’ve gotto rewind and watch it all over again in real time, and where’s the fun in that?And fucking … when’s it all going to fucking stop? I’m going to jump from rock to rock for the rest ofmy life until there aren’t any rocks left? I’m going to run each time I get itchy feet? Because I get themabout once a quarter, along with the utilities bills. More than that, even, during British Summer Time.I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you andme, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.
Nick Hornby