Quotes by Essayists - Page 72

Don't be afraid of the dark." She tousled his hair tolerantly. "I've never known a man who wasn't scared of more things than I was.
Edward Hoagland
A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We will never be more than we are meant to be!
Sorin Cerin
Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.
Flannery O'Connor
Every night, we’re all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one’s teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we’ve stopped trying to figure out what they mean.
Chuck Klosterman
I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprisingly of all, that I could carry it. That I could bear the unbearable. These realizations about my physical, material life couldn't help but spill over into the emotional and spiritual realm. That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding. It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn't spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical sufferings some of my emotional suffering would fade away. (93)
Cheryl Strayed
In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we are simply fighting in self-defense or for our children, or when we collectively attempt to change the institutions that are making war on us and our children.
Adrienne Rich
Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.
Edward Abbey
The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.
Adrienne Rich
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
Edward Abbey
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
There had always been a little wiggle room in state abortion laws, because doctors were still permitted to perform them for “therapeutic” reasons—to save a woman’s life, for example.7 But what did that mean, exactly? An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that “a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain.
Katha Pollitt
With the past I have nothing to do nor with the future. I live now.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person and cut across the accidents of place and time.
George Santayana
That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all
Nick Hornby
The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.
Léon Bloy
What does infinity mean to you? Are you not infinity and yourself?
Dejan Stojanovic
sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.
Georges Duhamel
All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own.
Monique Truong
O the joy of my spirit--it is uncaged--it darts like lightning!It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time,I will have thousands of globes and all time.
Walt Whitman
At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.
Thomas Mann
I loafe and invite my soul I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
Walt Whitman
Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago but it is put to better use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.
Dejan Stojanovic
Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
Barbara Kingsolver
You ask how it is possible to be your own father and son. You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
On the Rules of PerspectiveA bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.
Anne Carson
No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and ridiculous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.
Barbara Kingsolver
Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.
Flannery O'Connor
Realism can break a writer's heart.
Salman Rushdie
Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing.
Hartley Coleridge
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate and she is fate.
Thomas Mann
No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write
Xi Chuan
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]
Jonathan Franzen
In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.
Charles Lamb
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I can see myself before myself—A being through dark scenery.
Dejan Stojanovic
They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.
Virginia Woolf
In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will there be another super-superman to follow and another super-super-superman after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline come after, with return down the long line, through the superman down to man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether, and empty space?
H.L. Mencken
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy
It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
Russell Banks
... man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and tractable by housing and gentler usage...
Plutarch
A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
William Hazlitt
Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.
Virginia Woolf
There is a crack in everything God has made.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When there is noise and crowds, there is trouble; When everything is silent and perfect, There is just perfection and nothing To fill the air.
Dejan Stojanovic
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
H.L. Mencken
Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn't be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any incidents or characters that might occupy his theme; perhaps he never would. He could see though the book itself, he could feel its closed heft and see it opened, white pages comfortably large and shadowed gray by print; dense, numbered, full of meat. He sensed a narrative voice, speaking calmly and precisely, with immense assurance building, building; a voice too far off for him to hear, but speaking. ("Novelty")
John Crowley
I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them.
David Rakoff
As if one's capacity for pain had anything to do with life's apportionment of agonies, Mr. Kimmelbrod thought. Such idiocy.
Ayelet Waldman
I only wake to fall asleepAnd sleep, to awake without end.
Konstantin Batyushkov
A day is a miniature eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
Walt Whitman
As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.
Lewis Thomas
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The marks of that so-called intuition are simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, a habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, a magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank.
H.L. Mencken
It is a delicious moment certainly that of being well-nestled in bed and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come not past the limbs are tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful the labor of the day is gone.
Leigh Hunt