Quotes by Essayists - Page 50

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,In spider’s web a truth discerning,Attach one silken strand to youFor my returning.
E B White
An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.
Arthur Miller
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Virginia Woolf
You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. You boy pussy but i like tom cats. Just because you got the dance, don't think you stand a fucking chance.
Salman Rushdie
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
When I want to be reminded of stupidity, especially my own, I turn on the TV.
Dejan Stojanovic
People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.
Giacomo Leopardi
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
George Santayana
To come to nothing through something is the way to outside from both sides.
Dejan Stojanovic
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Roland Barthes
Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." And universal history is the gigantic and thousand-year effort to go on putting order into that huge, disorderly, anti-animal fantasy. What we call reason is no more than fantasy put into shape. Is there anything in the world more fantastic than that which is the most rational? Is there anything more fantastic than the mathematical point, and the infinite line, and, in general, all mathematics and all physics? Is there a more fantastic fancy than what we call "justice" and the other thing that we call "happiness"?
José Ortega y Gasset
Every reform was once a private opinion and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture.
Chuck Klosterman
One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.
Nick Hornby
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favour. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
All life is the struggle the effort to be itself.
José Ortega y Gasset
He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.''What you got on it?' the girl said.'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.''Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.
Flannery O'Connor
Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
Emil M. Cioran
Conviction without experiences makes for harshness.
Flannery O'Connor
Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure.
Dejan Stojanovic
Long ago an uncalled rain fell and a called-upon God stayed equally distant.
Dejan Stojanovic
He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.
H.L. Mencken
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
Thomas Carlyle
Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation.
Leslie Jamison
She knew there were words so terrible you heard them with your whole body. Guilty. And there were voices to say them. She knew there were people you might almost trust who would hear them, too, and be amazed, and still not really hear them because they know they were not the ones the words were spoken to.
Marilynne Robinson
Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue to run down for a long time. He knew the feeling.
John Crowley
Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy.
Salman Rushdie
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
David Foster Wallace
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
George Santayana
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.
Marilynne Robinson
His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.
Dejan Stojanovic
Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A gifted violin player in danger of becoming a virtuoso and thus too attached to his instrument handed it over to the Oneida authorities and never played again. When a visiting Canadian teacher complained that the community did not foster “genius or special talent,” Noyes was delighted, replying, “We never expected or desired to produce a Byron, a Napoleon, or a Michelangelo.” You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
Sarah Vowell
Almost as a rule, political dissidents were writers.
Dejan Stojanovic
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length on the other hand an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second.
Virginia Woolf
In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her?
Marilynne Robinson
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelaire “The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he is the good guy”—Ken Ammi
Charles Baudelaire
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe?
Virginia Woolf
Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.
Nick Hornby
The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness
Virginia Woolf
So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even mo
Barbara Kingsolver
New Year's Day is every man's birthday.
Charles Lamb
Life for both sexes - and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement - is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority - it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination - over other people.
Virginia Woolf
What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.
Barbara Kingsolver
There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
Marilynne Robinson
Your image has receded till it is like the thinnest shadow of the old moon... a thin silver edge appeared, and now you hang like a sickle over my life.
Virginia Woolf
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker Percy
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.
Virginia Woolf
Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,that soft summer morninground a turning in the path,the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,its legs in the air like a woman in needburning its wedding poisonslike a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.I am the vampire of my own heart,one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughterwho can no longer smile.Am I dead?I must be dead.
Charles Baudelaire
Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult they've already decided they want to become.
William Deresiewicz
Normality; show me normality, señor caballero, and I will show you an exception to the abnormal order of the universe; show me a normal event and I shall call it miraculous because it is normal.
Carlos Fuentes
Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?
David Foster Wallace
We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it.
José Martí
We may fail of our happiness strive we ever so bravely but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgment our chances and our capabilities.
Agnes Repplier
No one can keep his griefs in their prime they use themselves up.
E. M. Cioran
We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
Nick Hornby