Quotes by Essayists - Page 39

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
Thomas Mann
Unless, of course, one chose to join the increasing numbers who had decided they were so deep in despair that there was nothing worse to fear in life. These were men who had finally, and so early, so surprisingly early seen enough of something in their own ives and in the lives around them to convince them of the final futility of efforts of efforts to break the mean monthly cycle of debt and borrowing, borrowing and debt.
Ayi Kwei Armah
A breeze, a forgotten summer, a smile, all can fit into a storefront window.
Dejan Stojanovic
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
David Foster Wallace
...but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.
Cheryl Strayed
For dealing with blessings which come to us from outside we need a firm foundation based on reason and education; without this foundation, people keep on seeking these blessings and heaping them up but can never satisfy the insatiable appetites of their souls.
Plutarch
There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.
Barbara Kingsolver
You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
Flannery O'Connor
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H.L. Mencken
All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
Marilynne Robinson
We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.
Leslie Jamison
It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.
Barbara Kingsolver
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate whose faithful work will answer for him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?
Virginia Woolf
The universe is God's son.
Dejan Stojanovic
It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.
Flannery O'Connor
While gazing at myself from yourself, I was beautiful.
Dejan Stojanovic
Imagine a forty-five-year-old male fifty feet long, a slim, shiny black animal cutting the surface of green ocean water at twenty knots. At fifty tons it is the largest carnivore on earth. Imagine a four-hundred-pound heart the size of a chest of drawers driving five gallons of blood at a stroke through its aorta; a meal of forty salmon moving slowly down twelve-hundred feet of intestine…the sperm whale’s brain is larger than the brain of any other creature that ever lived…With skin as sensitive as the inside of your wrist.
Barry López
Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
David Foster Wallace
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could some blunders and absurdities have crept in forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time.
E B White
I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me.
Marilynne Robinson
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
Virginia Woolf
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those--in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can’t escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists....
Joseph Brodsky
The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex… Male identification is the act whereby women place men above women, including themselves, in credibility, status, and importance in most situations, regardless of the comparative quality the women may bring to the situation…. Interaction with women is seen as a lesser form of relating on every level.
Adrienne Rich
As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
Edward Abbey
Sorrow makes us all children again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
Virginia Woolf
We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.
Barbara Kingsolver
Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
Czesław Miłosz
I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.
Flannery O'Connor
But the man we are now analysing accustoms himself not to appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is a second-class man, subject to many limitations, incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality?
Ortega y Gasset
When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.
Chuck Klosterman
All great men come out of the middle classes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
Chuck Klosterman
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
Jonathan Franzen
The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
Thomas Mann
The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.
Gabriel Zaid
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
Barbara Kingsolver
Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.
Dejan Stojanovic
My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.
Flannery O'Connor
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.
Barbara Kingsolver
As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn’t own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don’t own a TV simply means you’re poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.
Chuck Klosterman
Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.
Russell Banks
Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.
H.L. Mencken
To admit what you see endangers principles.
Arthur Miller
James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone under. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they went upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed the staircase window. She had slept at once.
Virginia Woolf
Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.
Osip Mandelstam
All things are engaged in writing their history...Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Re-examine all that you have been told, dismiss that which insults your soul.
Walt Whitman
You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.
Zbigniew Herbert
He who doesn't accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire
I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in whom the writing of love was not directly attributable to the love of writing.A person of this sort falls terribly in love, but in the end it turns out that he is more bemused by a sheet of white paper than a sheet of white bed linen. He would rather leap into print with his lady than leap into bed with her. (This first pleases the lady and then annoys her. She wants him to do both, and with virtually the same impulse.)
E B White
Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwaves.
Salman Rushdie
Oh, to awake from dreaming!
Virginia Woolf