Quotes by Essayists - Page 49

Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn’t live off fame, but rather deeds.
Dejan Stojanovic
When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me.
Sarah Ruhl
We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.
Siri Hustvedt
The words of the true poems give you more than poems, they give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, & everything else, they balance the ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, they do not seek beauty, they are sought, forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death, yet they are not the finish, but rather the outset, they bring none of his or her terminus or to be content & full, whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of the stars, to learn one of the meanings, to launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings & never be quiet again.
Walt Whitman
Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Zeal will do more than knowledge.
William Hazlitt
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adopt the pace of nature her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war
David Foster Wallace
During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.
David Rakoff
Peril-ridden and fragile, the imperfect human body, what a shameful thing it was!
Kenzaburō Ōe
-A Word On Statistics-Out of every hundred people, those who always know better:fifty-two.Unsure of every step:almost all the rest. Ready to help,if it doesn't take long:forty-nine. Always good,because they cannot be otherwise:fourwell, maybe five. Able to admire without envy:eighteen. Led to errorby youth (which passes):sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with:four-and-forty. Living in constant fearof someone or something:seventy-seven. Capable of happiness:twenty-some-odd at most. Harmless alone,turning savage in crowds:more than half, for sure. Cruelwhen forced by circumstances:it's better not to know,not even approximately. Wise in hindsight:not many morethan wise in foresight. Getting nothing out of life except things:thirty(though I would like to be wrong). Balled up in painand without a flashlight in the dark:eighty-three, sooner or later. Those who are just:quite a few, thirty-five. But if it takes effort to understand:three. Worthy of empathy:ninety-nine. Mortal:one hundred out of one hundreda figure that has never varied yet.
Wisława Szymborska
Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.
Chuck Klosterman
Biography is the only true history.
Thomas Carlyle
Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it—I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?
Sarah Ruhl
…how it would be nice if, for every sea waiting for us, there would be a river, for us. And someone -a father, a lover, someone- able to take us by the hand and find that river -imagine it, invent it- and put us on its stream, with the lightness of one only word, goodbye. This, really, would be wonderful. It would be sweet, life, every life. And things wouldn’t hurt, but they would get near taken by stream, one could first shave and then touch them and only finally be touched. Be wounded, also. Die because of them. Doesn’t matter. But everything would be, finally, human. It would be enough someone’s fancy -a father, a lover, someone- could invent a way, here in the middle of the silence, in this land which don’t wanna talk. Clement way, and beautiful.A way from here to the sea.
Alessandro Baricco
But then the subject turned to the spiritual life and Meg talked about her many visits to ashrams in India and her admiration for Swami Muktananda and Gurumayi. That got in the way, especially because he told her of his skepticism regarding the guru industry, and suggested she might profitably read Gita Mehta’s book Karma Cola. “Why are you so cynical?” she asked him, as if she genuinely wanted to know the answer, and he said that if you grew up in India it was easy to conclude that these people were fakes. “Yes, of course there are lots of charlatans,” she said, reasonably, “but can’t you discriminate?” He shook his head sadly. “No,” he said. “No, I can’t.” That was the end of their chat.
Salman Rushdie
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf
The Jews could be put down very plausible as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.
H.L. Mencken
There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin.
Dejan Stojanovic
One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
Niyi Osundare
The yard consisted of grass and a Russian Olive tree, which was about the only kind of tree able to survive on the high prairies. Its thin, grey leaves made it look as though it were on the verge of dying, thereby fooling the elements and the bad weather into thinking that they didn't have to bother with something so spindly and bent, something so obviously on its last legs.
Thomas King
The first law of success ... is concentration: to bend all the energies to one point and to go directly to that point looking neither to the right nor the left.
William Matthews
His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.
Thomas Mann
I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.
Leslie Jamison
So muchhuman cruelty is simplyincidental is simplybrainless. Simply nocommon sense. You couldtake the entirety of thecommon sense of humansand put it in the palm ofyour hand and still haveroom for your dick.
Anne Carson
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.
David Foster Wallace
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
Adam Zagajewski
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H.L. Mencken
The yellow moon dreamilytipping buttons of lightdown among the leaves. Marimba,marimba - from beyond theblack street.Somebody dancing,somebodygetting the helloutta here. Shadows of catsweave round the treetrunks,the exposed knotty roots.("Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees")
Denise Levertov
Modesty answers not the crude how of femininity, but the beautiful why.
Wendy Shalit
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runway sun, I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again look for me under your boot soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you
Walt Whitman
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never any of us are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
Katherine Anne Porter
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards–their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble–the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.
Virginia Woolf
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a room with many windowssome thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.
Jane Hirshfield
That man who lives for self alone Lives for the meanest mortal known.
Joaquin Miller
You are hurrying to the sweet place, To the nonsense chasing your spirit And in the nonsense you look for answers.
Dejan Stojanovic
We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas.
Mona Caird
A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet, it is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man.
Arnold Haultain
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its ends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He was very religious he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.
Jorge Luis Borges
Themistocles said "The Athenians govern the Greeks I govern the Athenians you my wife govern me your son governs you."
Plutarch
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.
William Hazlitt
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
Virginia Woolf
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
Forget the fictional characters – how many authors are being stopped on the street?
Joshua Cohen
Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt
How do you have to live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think?
Herta Müller
If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of streams.....when, from the mountain-top, she beheld, far off, across the Sea of Marmara the plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or two which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed she might share the majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such believers do.
Virginia Woolf
If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Time is a great legalizer even in the fields of morals.
H.L. Mencken
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
H.L. Mencken
This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smokey mouth.
Steve Almond
As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
Salman Rushdie
If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.
William Hazlitt