Quotes.gd
  • Home
  • Authors
  • Topics
  • Quote of the Day
  • Home
  • Authors
  • Topics
  • Quote of the Day
  • Home
  • Authors
  • Topics
  • Quote of the Day
  • Top 100 Quotes
  • Professions
  • Nationalities

Quotes by Essayists - Page 34

What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.
Rachel Cusk
It is proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
Edward Abbey
Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.
David Shields
Who can hide himself from death or who can embrace the wind?
Sorin Cerin
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Salman Rushdie
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
H.L. Mencken
The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.
Sarah Ruhl
Those who are fond of setting things to rights have no great objection to setting them wrong.
William Hazlitt
Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics?
José Ortega y Gasset
When you go in search of honey, you must expect to be stung by bees.
Joseph Joubert
Time wasn't passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.
David Foster Wallace
A house built on greed cannot long endure.
Edward Abbey
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
Paul Valéry
I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
Virginia Woolf
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
Adam Gopnik
Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? - with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?
Virginia Woolf
Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.
Flannery O'Connor
Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.
Walter Savage Landor
Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.
Edward Abbey
Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.
Siri Hustvedt
The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.
Dejan Stojanovic
Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space.
Elizabeth Alexander
If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!" (William Strunk) ... Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?
E B White
.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.
Cheryl Strayed
The gross evil of our time defies all labels.
Edward Abbey
Speech is civilization itself.
Thomas Mann
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
Barbara Kingsolver
All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass to their daily affairs and experience to what they have an opportunity to know and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture.
William Hazlitt
On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.
David Foster Wallace
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.Healthy, free, the world before me.The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose.Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune.Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing.
Walt Whitman
If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.
Sarah Vowell
The whole reason I wanted to take Owen to Disney World is that I fear that someday he's going to look through his childhood photo album and wonder why all his vacations with his aunt took place at places like the McKinley Memorial and Wounded Knee. And yet here we are. Powell's cemetery was just too close to Cinderella's Castle for me to pass up.
Sarah Vowell
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H.L. Mencken
Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
Dejan Stojanovic
If the world were merely seductive that would be easy. If it were merely challenging that would be no problem. But I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savour) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E B White
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
Barbara Kingsolver
Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again--lazy people.
Charles Baudelaire
Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
Chuck Klosterman
Addio, Dann. Addio, piccolo signor Rail, che mi hai insegnato la vita. Avevi ragione tu: non siamo morti. Non è possibile morire vicino a te. Perfino Mormy ha aspettato che tu fossi lontano per farlo. Adesso sono io che vado lontano. E non sarà vicino a te che morirò. Addio, mio piccolo signore, che sognavi i treni e sapevi dov'era l'infinito. Tutto quel che c'era io l'ho visto, guardando te. E sono stata ovunque, stando con te. È una cosa che non riuscirò a spiegare mai a nessuno. Ma è così. Me la porterò dietro, e sarà il mio segreto più bello. Addio, Dann. Non pensarmi mai, se non ridendo. Addio.
Alessandro Baricco
The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.
David Foster Wallace
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...
Virginia Woolf
Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
Mark Strand
I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.
Charles Baudelaire
I don't know which is worse—to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those roadblocks removed from its path. If you don't think cheaply, then there at least won't be the quality of cheapness in your writing, even though you may not be able to write well. The teacher can try to weed out what is positively bad, and this should be the aim of the whole college. Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn't require his attention.
Flannery O'Connor
There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.
Edward Abbey
Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.
David Foster Wallace
There are people who have an appetite for grief pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.
Siri Hustvedt
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling?
Charles Lamb
... I somehow got the idea that oak floors were located exclusively in New York City. This came chiefly from watching Woody Allen movies. I wanted to live someplace that looked like Mia Farrow's apartment in 'Hannah and Her Sisters' (little did I know that it was Mia Farrow's apartment). To me, this kind of space did not connote wealth. These were places where paint was peeling and the rugs were frayed, places where smart people sat around drinking gin and tonics, having interesting conversations, and living, according to my logic, in an authentic way.
Meghan Daum
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
Jorge Luis Borges
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.
George Santayana
It came to my house.It sat on my shoulders.Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.
Mark Strand
Tristetea, ca si suferinta, ne revela existenta, deoarece în ele avem în constiinta separatia noastra de lumea obiectiva si nelinistea care da un caracter tragic vietuirii în existenta.Daca ar exista un zeu al tristetii, lui nu i-ar putea creste decât aripi negre si grele, pentru a zbura nu înspre ceruri, ci în infern.
Emil M. Cioran
In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.
Sarah Vowell
Your eyes will always be closer to your soul than to any other part of your body except the heart.
Sorin Cerin
PreviousPrevious Previous 1 … 32 33 34 35 36 … 108 Next NextNext

Quotes.gd

  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms
  • DMCA

Site Links

  • Authors
  • Topics
  • Quote Of The Day
  • Top 100 Quotes
  • Professions
  • Nationalities

Authors in the News

  • LeBron James
  • Justin Bieber
  • Bob Marley
  • Ed Sheeran
  • Rohit Sharma
  • Mark Williams
  • Black Sabbath
  • Gisele Bundchen
  • Ozzy Osbourne
  • Rise Against
Quotes.gd
  • Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram Follow us on Instagram
  • Save us on Pinterest Save us on Pinterest
  • Follow us on Youtube Follow us on Youtube
  • Follow us on X Follow us on X

@2024 Quotes.gd. All rights reserved