Quotes by Essayists - Page 46

Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)
Virginia Woolf
The one who did not understood that his time’s root supports his life tree was born in vain.
Sorin Cerin
Conscience reigns but it does not govern.
Paul Valéry
Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.
Flannery O'Connor
Belgium is the best remedy against patriotism.
Geert van Istendael
Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
Barbara Kingsolver
But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
David Foster Wallace
For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.
Barry López
A minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful citizen - no oracle at all but a man of more than average moral instincts who if he knows anything knows how little he knows.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nothing can be more painful than the cry of the word which gave us the inspiration to dream of love.
Sorin Cerin
To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Walter Pater
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
Lewis Thomas
The years teach much the days never know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a way of being wrong which is also sometimes necessarily right.
Edward Abbey
Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety.
Joseph Joubert
Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet.
Marilynne Robinson
Yet though Americans have been driving up to their houses for decades and entering through backdoors, side doors, kitchen doors, and especially doors through garages, architects keep designing houses with ceremonial front doors that are nowhere near any car or driveway.
Akiko Busch
What did I think I was doing? What did she think she was doing? When I want to kiss people in that way now, with mouths and tongues and all that, it's because I want other things too: sex, Friday nights at the cinema, company and conversation, fused networks of family and friends, Lemsips brought to me in bed when I am ill, a new pair of ears for my records and CDs, maybe a little boy called Jack and a little girl called Holly or Maisie, I haven't decided yet. But I didn't want any of those things from Alison Ashworth. Not children, because we were children, and not Friday nights at the pictures, because we went Saturday mornings, and not Lemsips, because my mum did that, not even sex, especially not sex, please God not sex, the filthiest and most terrifying invention of the early seventies.
Nick Hornby
Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.
Plutarch
I've never been in love, never in my life.Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night,but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked,and the key is lost.
Sarah Ruhl
Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.
Frank Moore Colby
I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.
Edward Thomas
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality depend by contact with mystery. Fiction should be both canny and uncanny. In a good deal of popular criticism, there is the notion operating that all fiction has to be about the Average Man, and has to depict average ordinary everyday life, that every fiction writer must produce what used to be called "a slice of life." But if life, in that sense, satisfied us, there would be no sense in producing literature at all.
Flannery O'Connor
Every noble work is at first impossible.
Thomas Carlyle
Pray calm yourselves. I have eleven children, and I am twenty-six times a grandma, and I have seen them all through their silly seasons, and when it come on them they will run the Devil bowlegged keeping up with their mischief. I think she'll wake when she tires of it. A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.
Arthur Miller
The high prize of life the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.
Chuck Klosterman
To live means to have ... a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something we make it empty.
José Ortega y Gasset
There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in order best to use the talents he has been given, has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents. This doesn't mean that, within his limitations, he shouldn't try to reach as many people as possible, but it does mean that he must not lower his standards to do so.
Flannery O'Connor
For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until by and by out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
One truth discovered one pang of regret at not being able to express it is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
William Hazlitt
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Virginia Woolf
Here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Virginia Woolf
It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.
Cheryl Strayed
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.
Siri Hustvedt
Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you try to convert someone, it will never be toeffect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals andendures them with the same impatience. You keepwatch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that areracking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged soulswhose faith comes down to a more or less deliberatetorment they would like to see generalized, instituted.The happiness of others never having been a motiveor principle of action, it is invoked only to appeaseconscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever wedetermine upon an action, the impulse leading to itand forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,and do so all the better if we disguise asconvictions the misery we want to share, to lavish onothers. However glamorous its appearances, proselytismnonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No oneis willing to endure alone the discipline he may evenhave assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary'sbonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberatebut to enchain.Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he enviesyour vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas orslogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself.
Emil M. Cioran
The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
E B White
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
Flannery O'Connor
We cannot conquer fate and necessity yet we can yield to them in such a manner as to be greater than if we could.
Walter Savage Landor
Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers.
Dejan Stojanovic
Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.
Nancy Mairs
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often.
Nick Hornby
Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.
Dejan Stojanovic
Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.
Thomas Keneally
Obedience alone gives the right to command.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
True friendship is self-love at second hand.
William Hazlitt
Do not ever go out of yourself because you will get lost even from your life.
Sorin Cerin
To understand possible means to understand impossible.
Dejan Stojanovic
Pride ruined the angels.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them and a lucky hit either in business or reputation improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.
William Hazlitt
We are angrier with the sky than with our actions.
Sorin Cerin
He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.
Virginia Woolf
...I am talking about evil.It blooms.It eats.It grins.
Anne Carson
For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light.
Barbara Kingsolver
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George Santayana