Quotes by Essayists - Page 47

We can start all the organic farms we want, but we can't stop congress from declaring pizza sauce a vegetable.
William Deresiewicz
Macaulay is well for awhile but one wouldn't live under Niagara.
Thomas Carlyle
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.
Leslie Jamison
Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know.
Flannery O'Connor
Who can be close to you without the Divine Light of his heart?
Sorin Cerin
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man ever wetted clay and then left it as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.
Plutarch
The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.
Flannery O'Connor
For there is no virtue, the honor and credit for which procures a man more odium than that of justice; and this, because more than any other, it acquires a man power and authority among the common people.
Plutarch
Few persons realize how much of their happiness such as it is is dependent upon their work.
John Burroughs
Death and life were just adjacent verandas.
Salman Rushdie
Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.
Salman Rushdie
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.
Cheryl Strayed
I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.
Virginia Woolf
Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
Emil M. Cioran
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
Flannery O'Connor
I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.
Nick Hornby
What good were real feelings anyway?
Nick Hornby
In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
Charles Simic
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.
Thomas Carlyle
I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.
Ishmael Reed
A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.
Siri Hustvedt
It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband and wife. Why did So-and-so enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one's power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves.
Salman Rushdie
Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of our life depends on so little.
Maurice Maeterlinck
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.
Dejan Stojanovic
We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier
The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette.
John Ralston Saul
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough. If we always had smiled on the one who is gone, there would be no despair in our grief; and some sweetness would cling to our tears, reminiscent of virtues and happiness. For our recollections of veritable love—which indeed is the act of virtue containing all others—call from our eyes the same sweet, tender tears as those most beautiful hours wherein memory was born.
Maurice Maeterlinck
In each painting, I think, it’s as if  God were giving up on finishing the world.
Yves Bonnefoy
Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.
Nick Hornby
She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.
Barbara Kingsolver
Youth fades love droops the leaves of friendship fall A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Epicurus said you should live for pleasure - adding that nothing brings more pleasure than a little sun and a glass of water. It is on this principle that our conjugal existence has rested for three years, devoted to making love, reading, eating excellent meals, spending a few days in a nice hotel by the sea, visiting out friends (not very many, all without children), going to concerts and movies, sleeping, cultivating our garden.
Benoît Duteurtre
Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
Thomas Carlyle
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it." -- William Styron (born June 11 1925)
William Styron
I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, "I did it because I'm a dirty dog." This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one.
Chuck Klosterman
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
Virginia Woolf
I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am.
Dejan Stojanovic
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
Thomas Mann
Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?' Nyawira asked rather sharply. 'Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood? Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions? Miriama Ba of Senegal, So Long A Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.''I am not much of a reader of fiction,' Kamiti said. 'Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.''Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?' Nyawira pressed. 'Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!''I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,' Kamiti said, trying to redeem himself. 'Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads … Not that I read everything, but …''I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,' Nyawira said. 'The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have often misunderstood men grossly, and I have misrepresented them when I understood them, sacrificing sense to make a phrase. Here, of course, is where even the most conscientious critic often goes aground; he is apt to be an artist before he is a scientist, and the impulse to create something passionately is stronger in him than the impulse to state something accurately.
H.L. Mencken
To dream on occasion is not dreaming, To love on occasion is not love.
Dejan Stojanovic
When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society," the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics.
Siri Hustvedt
The superstitious man wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them.
Plutarch
The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.
Flannery O'Connor
I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.
Anne Fadiman
Good friendships are fragile things and require as much care as any other fragile and precious thing.
Randolph Bourne
So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.
Flannery O'Connor
Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.
Leslie Jamison
Albania’s future is towards Christianity, since it is connected with it culturally, old memories, and its pre-Turkish nostalgia. With the passing of time, the late Islamic religion that came with the Ottomans should evaporate (at first in Albania and then in Kosova), until it will be replaced by Christianity or, to be more exact, Christian culture. Thus from one evil (the prohibition of religion in 1967) goodness will come. The Albanian nation will make a great historical correction that will accelerate its unity with its mother continent: Europe
Ismail Kadare
Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.
Marilynne Robinson
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.
Czesław Miłosz
We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have todo is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true. But you knowall this," he concluded, subdued.
Stanisław Lem
I am tired of having handsshe saidI want wings —But what will you do without your handsto be human?I am tired of humanshe saidI want to live on the sun —
Louise Glück
(from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens)In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop.
Nick Hornby