Quotes by Essayists - Page 59

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
Flannery O'Connor
There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.
Jorge Luis Borges
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
Charles Lamb
Do not be too timid and squeamish. ... All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For scientists, reality is not optional.
Barbara Kingsolver
It is well there is no one without fault for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to a different species.
William Hazlitt
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
Roland Barthes
And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that
Virginia Woolf
They all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole.
Edmund White
I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it - the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elevation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here.
Siri Hustvedt
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I loveIf you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.You will hardly know who I am or what I meanBut I shall be good health to you nonethelessAnd filter and fibre your blood.
Walt Whitman
But language is wine upon his lips
Virginia Woolf
If you've ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life.
Arnold Bennett
I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.
Monique Truong
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Virginia Woolf
In its proper role, a number counts the missing words.
Dejan Stojanovic
He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and “the Singularity’s chosen avatar,
Jonathan Franzen
They read a little bit, write a little, and especially agree with themselves on important moves, important information, important awards, important writers that they plan to enthrone forever in history through a variety of memberships and numerous prizes awarded under the influence of top bureaucrats who know everything, not only about literature, but also about secret conspiracies, the Masons that lurk in every corner to crucify someone, steal someone’s soul and sell it to an unknown devil, about whom only the chief bureaucrat possesses secret knowledge that he doesn’t share; about history, ghosts, missing continents; about who said what to whom in confidence.
Dejan Stojanovic
O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish; Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d; Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined; The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer.That you are here—that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
Walt Whitman
Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.
Barry López
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.
Barbara Kingsolver
Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of love which is more enduring that death, the finis vitae sed non amoris that has pursued us through the centuries is a lie. But this lie is not ridiculous, it's simply futile. To be a clock on the other hand, measuring the passage of time, one that is smashed and rebuilt over and again, one in whose mechanism despair and love are set in motion by the watchmaker along with the first movements of the cogs. To know one is a repeater of suffering felt ever more deeply as it becomes increasingly comical through a multiple repetitions. To replay human existence - fine. But to replay it in the way a drunk replays a corny tune pushing coins over and over into the jukebox?
Stanisław Lem
If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still felt to make some claim on us that this project of discrediting his law is persisted in with such energy. The unscholarly character of the project may derive from the supposed familiarity of the subject.
Marilynne Robinson
When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.
Gary Snyder
Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities and for no more.
Gail Hamilton
To-day well, my Utopia, if ever I framed one, would be a land where the laws demanded that people should be vicious. Then one would be able to count at any rate on a little virtue. If no man might live with a woman in any but an irregular union, there would be at once quite a run on honest matrimony and the Law Courts would be full of desperately wicked monogamists; while if every one was expected to steal and swindle, there would soon be an extensive criminal class who respected property.
Edward Verrall Lucas
When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
Virginia Woolf
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Thomas Carlyle
We live longerbut less preciselyand in shorter sentences.
Wisława Szymborska
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
Jorge Luis Borges
We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.
Anne Fadiman
It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.
Chuck Klosterman
Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.
Giacomo Leopardi
Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?
Virginia Woolf
it's hard to find time to think about Kansas.
Marilynne Robinson
But the compulsive overachievement of today's elite college students - the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can - is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn't capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they are the only one who's suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everybody thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are.
William Deresiewicz
It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child’s desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn’t a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of
David Foster Wallace
No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
William Deresiewicz
The awful penalty of success is the haunting dread of subsequent failure.
A.C. Benson
[P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.
Jonathan Franzen
My books are friends that never fai
Thomas Carlyle
I would like to curl up and become a small thing. About this big. And still. Very still. Have you ever become so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved’s hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?
Sarah Ruhl
So nigh is grandeur to our dust So near is God to man. When Duty whispers low Thou must The youth replies I can.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hope! of all ills that men endure The only cheap and universal cure.
Abraham Cowley
Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.
Flannery O'Connor
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.
Salman Rushdie
A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.
Russell Banks
The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A paucity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.
Jonathan Franzen
A woman's strength is the irresistible might of weakness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But what is woman? Only one of nature's agreeable blunders.
Abraham Cowley
All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.
Emil M. Cioran
A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could have only one book, what would it be? I always say, "How to Build a Boat.
Stephen Wright
Children have no business expressing opinions on anything except "Do you have enough room in the toes?
Florence King
A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.
Adrienne Rich
An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.
Jonathan Franzen
There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more that of the sick who want something different and that of the traveler who says "Anywhere but here."
Ralph Waldo Emerson