Quotes by Essayists - Page 29

When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.
Russell Banks
For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not - Heaven help us _ all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone...Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another. But it is not altogether plain sailing either...these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled up on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own...so that one will only come if it is raining....another if you can promise it a glass of wine - and so on...
Virginia Woolf
He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.
Thomas Mann
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the woodThis Eastertide call into mind the men,Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, shouldHave gathered them and will do never again.
Edward Thomas
Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.
William Hazlitt
I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.
Charles Lamb
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.
Virginia Woolf
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
H.L. Mencken
I suggest you forget about forgiveness for now and strive for acceptance instead. Accept that the man you love was unfaithful to you. Accept that the woman you once held in regard treated you with disrespect. Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn't want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are a part of even a joyful life. Accept that it's going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.
Cheryl Strayed
Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.
Claudia Rankine
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.
Paul Valéry
I was happy without having sought happiness.
Siri Hustvedt
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. ... Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again though it contradicts everything you said today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I could have married again while I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law in a hundred miles. In retrospect, I'm very grateful for whatever reluctance it was that kept me alone until your mother came. Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.
Marilynne Robinson
A day's impact is better than a month of dead pull.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. The longer I live, the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and the wonder of the world.
John Burroughs
Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
Virginia Woolf
Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
Virginia Woolf
Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.
Arthur Miller
The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
Siri Hustvedt
Whatever course you decide upon there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires....courage.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.
Cheryl Strayed
Your soul fountain will never drain until the instant of eternity will halt before it to drink the water of death.
Sorin Cerin
Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?
Salman Rushdie
Some of your hurts you have cured And the sharpest you still have survived But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
Flannery O'Connor
You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.
Arnold Bennett
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H.L. Mencken
This time like all times is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cultivated man wise to know and bold to perform is the end to which nature works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy
Siri Hustvedt
From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.
Georges Perec
We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.
Russell Banks
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
Emil M. Cioran
Nobility is not only in forgiveness.
Dejan Stojanovic
Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognise that the world they have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation of masculine subjectivity; they are neither objective, nor value-free, nor inclusively "human." Feminism implies that we recognise for us, the distortion, of male-created ideologies, and that we proceed to think, and act, out of that recognition.
Adrienne Rich
To disdain today is to prove that yesterday has been misunderstood.
Maurice Maeterlinck
How often – I continue reflecting – is it that we see what we want to see, rather than what is really before our eyes. In the trade we call this confirmation bias, and our brains are riddled with it. We take a position on something and thereafter only see whatever confirms that position, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
John Dolan
If you would lift me you must be on a higher ground.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
E B White
Do jungle animals understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play; but whether the trees are healthy or corroded, whether they harbour demons or good spirites, we cannot say. Nor do we know the greatest secret of all: that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they. And the trees, whose leaves we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once, they climbed like squirrels and bounded like deer, until one day they paused, and their legs grew down into the earth and stuck there, spreading, and vegetation sprouted from their swaying heads. They remember this as a fact; but the lived reality of their fauna years, the how-it-felt of that chaotic freedom is beyond recapture. They remember it as a rustle in their leaves.
Salman Rushdie
Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
Salman Rushdie
We are governed not by armies but by ideas.
Mona Caird
The sexual license prevalent among {the} Sixties generation was deplorable, but no more so than predatory Capitalism, with cruel slums alongsideabsurd affluence: affluence which paid for...depictions of the Holy Family as a form of expiation. Love was the basis for what he believed. Promiscuity certainly violated that polestar, yet caring for others, even in "fooling around"--which was not to justify it--topped dog-eat-dog Capitalism.
Edward Hoagland
He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
William Hazlitt
It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death…I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation.
William Styron
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Love, our subject:we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
Adrienne Rich
If you were to stare at this box of matches, you could extract entire worlds out of it. If you search for tastes in a book, you will certainly find them because it was said: seek and ye shall find. But a critic should not rifle, search. Let him sit back with folded arms, waiting for the book to find him. Talents should not be sought with a microscope, a talent should let people know about itself by striking at all the bells.
Witold Gombrowicz
The body releases its electricity, merges with another, and together there is something like God in this pleasure. But afterward, in the quiet redolent air, there must also be offerings of truth. And so the mystery of love deepens.
Steve Almond
When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.
Cheryl Strayed
The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.
Edward Abbey
I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below.
Jean Giono
He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.
Dejan Stojanovic
Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.
Barbara Kingsolver
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, one of the nation, of many nations, the smallest the same and the the largest
Walt Whitman