Quotes by Essayists - Page 55

The majority of men have no opinions, and these have to be pumped into them from outside, like lubricants into machinery. Hence it is necessary that some mind or other should hold and exercise authority, so that the people without opinions- the majority- can start having opinions. For without these, the common life of humanity would be chaos, a historic void, lacking in any organic structure. Consequently, without a spiritual power, without someone to command, and in proportion as this is lacking, chaos reigns over mankind.
Ortega y Gasset
To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you.
Anne Carson
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man
Virginia Woolf
The word "now" is like a bomb thrown through the window and it ticks.
Arthur Miller
She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink.
Barbara Kingsolver
It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.
Roland Barthes
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
David Foster Wallace
There remain times when one can only endure. One lives on one doesn't die and the only thing that one can do is to fill one's mind and time as far as possible with the concerns of other people. It doesn't bring immediate peace but it brings the dawn nearer.
Arthur Christopher Benson
What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Roland Barthes
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.
Roland Barthes
Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. It's not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.
Katha Pollitt
We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in proper figures.
Joseph Addison
Look at the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just gone through a divorce. Or if you're anorexic. Or if you're unemployed. Or if you're a prostitute. Or if you've fought in a war, or if you've been raped, or if you've lost somebody . . . There are lots and lots of factors that push people over the edge; none of these factors are likely to make you feel anything but fucking miserable.
Nick Hornby
Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories.
Mark Slouka
You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.
Jonathan Franzen
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.
Flannery O'Connor
All raw, uncooked, protesting."(on Aldous Huxley)
Virginia Woolf
She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
Flannery O'Connor
The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there.
Siri Hustvedt
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
David Foster Wallace
A question, doctor," he said. "Why doesn't the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?" He smiled coolly. "Why doesn't the coyote simply go eat Chinese food?
David Foster Wallace
When he placed a candle on the shelf across the room from him and lit its wick, he came to realize that in fact everything he saw was a flat surface, like a screen – that in fact dimension was an illusion. Everything was a flat surface and the pinpoints of light, whether from a candle on the shelf or a gaslamp above the street, were punctures in that surface – gashes made by somebody behind the screen. He realized then that beyond everything he saw there was an entire realm of blazing sunfire, and that colors were only the silhouettes of people in that realm – walking, eating, dancing, doing whatever they were doing behind the screen. “It astonished Adolphe that everyone failed to realize they were just figures on a tapestry, the shadows of something else. He was therefore amused by the conceit of women, for instance, who who admired the creamy color of their skin when in fact it was only the haze of some other woman behind the vast screen staring into a mirror. Adolphe could explain all of this to himself but he could not explain Janine: Janine wasn't the same as the others. Janine was like their mother; and Adolphe decided Lulu was from this place beyond the surface, and she had, perhaps when she was a little girl, slipped through. “Adolphe wondered why Lulu hadn't told them about this, and then realized she probably would when she thought they were old enough to understand it. He could see it wasn't something one would want to tell a child too soon.
Steve Erickson
The only thing a person of my age can do is fall in love secretly, silently, likeI had done with Mariana. Fall in love knowing that all is lost and there is no hope.
José Emilio Pacheco
Ralph Waldo Emerson“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.
Flannery O'Connor
Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind.
Edward Abbey
...The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?""To be a writer, you need readers.""I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?
Barbara Kingsolver
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
Walter Benjamin
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
David Foster Wallace
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...
Virginia Woolf
if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.
Adrienne Rich
Hundreds of ladybugs had taken shelter from the winter in the crevices of the decayed windows. From there, they broke into the apartment in commando squads. My joy at that first sighting of the ladybug spreading its lower winglets on the rim of the jam glass, flashing three spots of fortune, soon turned into something tragic and Greek, a bloodied slaughter. Like in Ajax, I had to pluck ladybugs from my toothbrush every evening and in the morning shake out my shirt that, overnight, was infested with too much luck, and at lunch, I'd fish kamikazee-ladybugs out of my soup bowl, their Etna's crater in the middle of the round kitchen table. When I shut my eyes and held the hose to my ear and heard the little crackle of tiny bodies sucked into the eye of the tornado, I couldn't remain neutral. Putting away the vacuum, I consoled myself with sentences of friends who, after a beer or three, like to repeat to me the axiom that sooner or later, living in the city, each person discovers himself to be the murder of his own happiness. They were genuine Berlin ladybugs, they'd occupied the windows illegally like my friends in apartments from which they were later evicted.
Aleš Šteger
Being brave in front of faith does not mean to be humble before death.
Sorin Cerin
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
H.L. Mencken
...Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the peopleare right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths,the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.
E B White
God the first garden made and the first city Cain.
Abraham Cowley
Bureaucracy is a huge beast; deeply rooted, it exists even among artists; it’s an almost losing battle against it.
Dejan Stojanovic
How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?
David Foster Wallace
The ability for a woman to be free is connected with her ability to love another woman.
Susan Griffin
What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Walker Percy
The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you––I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow––this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.
Virginia Woolf
And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.
Chuck Klosterman
Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams
Ralph Waldo Emerson
वसुधा का नेता कौन हुआ?भूखंड-विजेता कौन हुआ?अतुलित यश-क्रेता कौन हुआ?नव-धर्म-प्रणेता कौन हुआ?जिसने न कभी आराम किया,विघ्नों में रहकर नाम किया
Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar'
I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.
Jorge Luis Borges
Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out.
Marilynne Robinson
Should we not invariably act in this life as though the God whom our heart desires with its highest desire were watching our every action?
Maurice Maeterlinck
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
Barbara Kingsolver
I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.
Jorge Luis Borges
Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.
William H. Gass
... It happened very fast. And now that he's dead he can't remember pain. It's as if he'd never existed.'He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn't sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.
Jonathan Franzen
Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie, and apply subtle pressure while their wearer is speaking frankly and straightforwardly of other matters.
Anne Hollander
Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence?
Walt Whitman
Lifting her lovely and longing face towards the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her time, through space, through the concatenate cells of her unfolding self. Where to now, Abbzug? You're twenty-eight and a half years old, Abbzug. 
Edward Abbey
Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.
Jorge Luis Borges