Quotes by Essayists - Page 53

Life is now ... this day this hour ... and is probably the only experience of the kind one is to have.
Charles Macomb Flandrau
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
Roland Barthes
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf
In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,
Mary Ruefle
It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.
Flannery O'Connor
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago He would've thought they were birds Or angels from another world Or messengers from other planets.
Dejan Stojanovic
We should tell ourselves, once and for all, that it is the first duty of the soul to become as happy, complete, independent, and great as lies in its power. Herein is no egoism, or pride. To become effectually generous and sincerely humble there must be within us a confident, tranquil, and clear comprehension of all that we owe to ourselves.
Maurice Maeterlinck
And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man.
José Ortega y Gasset
How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?
Walker Percy
In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps.
Dejan Stojanovic
A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.
Dejan Stojanovic
How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader?
Joshua Cohen
Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I had become an arrow of sound aimed at the most terrible creature in the city.
Fran Wilde
In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.
Barbara Kingsolver
And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste.
Jonathan Franzen
His heart was as great as the world but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.
Siri Hustvedt
Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? Ok, so who's the arsehole now?
Nick Hornby
There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.
Nick Hornby
The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned , for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.
Ortega y Gasset
Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.
Marilynne Robinson
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.
Shalom Auslander
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.
Mark Strand
I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.
Nick Hornby
The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.
David Foster Wallace
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[Shakespeare} the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping
Virginia Woolf
If we deny the thirst of love, we stand to lose the last known address of the stranger whithin us.
Sorin Cerin
Dividing earth and skyis not the right wayto think about this wholeness.It only allows one to liveat a more precise address--were I to be searched forI'd be found much faster.My distinguishing marksare rapture and despair.From 'Sky', in the collection 'Miracle Fair
Wisława Szymborska
Vandals listen only when others are stronger.If vandals are equal or strongerTheir word is the last word.
Dejan Stojanovic
Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood.
Plutarch
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
Roland Barthes
Patriotism, that least discerning of pas
Jorge Luis Borges
No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.
Leslie Jamison
The beautiful is always bizarre.
Charles Baudelaire
The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything
E B White
When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
E B White
The present is an eternal now.
Abraham Cowley
Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do -- have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.
Cheryl Strayed
This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy.
Leslie Jamison
Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.
Edward Abbey
If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness.
Dejan Stojanovic
It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse.
H.L. Mencken
Of a truth men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Thomas Carlyle
The past is never where you think you left it.
Katherine Anne Porter
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
E B White
There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than... a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.
Walter Benjamin
The mind of man, moreover, works with equal 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 on the timepiece of the mind by one second.
Virginia Woolf
I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that.
Marilynne Robinson
Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.
Joseph Epstein
It is doubtless a vice to turn one's eyes inward too much but I am my own comedy and tragedy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Deliver thunder, GodIf you choose not to talk.
Dejan Stojanovic
The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.
David Foster Wallace
The secret of happiness is something to do
John Burroughs