Quotes by Essayists - Page 81

I wonder if the real measure of "home" is the degree to which you can leave it alone. Maybe appreciating a house means knowing when to stop decorating. Maybe you've never really lived there until you've thrown its broken pieces in the garbage. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home.
Meghan Daum
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested--'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live them from the devil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
Thomas Keneally
To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.
David Shields
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience- if they did they would live elsewhere.
E B White
I liked to sail alone. The sea was the same as a girl to me - I did not want anyone else along.
E B White
The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.
Virginia Woolf
Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.
Stephen Vizinczey
From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge.
Al Álvarez
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are but in what direction we are moving.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Grown men do not need leaders.
Edward Abbey
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
Roland Barthes
What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . When one so exposes it [integrity] and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf.
Virginia Woolf
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
H.L. Mencken
To learn to love, one must first learn to see.
Maurice Maeterlinck
remembering and forgiving can be contrary things
Marilynne Robinson
At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts
William Styron
No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you’re pootling about… But what can you do about it? We don’t choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.
Nick Hornby
An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.
Walter Savage Landor
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
Chuck Klosterman
What a blessed thing it is that nature when she invented manufactured and patented her audiors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
H.L. Mencken
Miseries of a birth.
Roland Barthes
Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories.Borges: In fact, that’s what it is. If we are something, we are our past, aren’t we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate—it doesn’t matter. It’s there, isn’t it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us. (Conversations, Vol. 1)
Jorge Luis Borges
How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then?
Salman Rushdie
Every man needs his Siren To check his courage and strength When he hears her song In his travels through the unknown.
Dejan Stojanovic
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.
H.L. Mencken
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
Jorge Luis Borges
Delay of justice is injustice.
Walter Savage Landor
We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.
Georges Bernanos
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is... In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles. and ripples, and - as I am a Northerner - for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
Joseph Brodsky
And what cats have to tellon each return from hellis this: that dying is what the living do, that dying is what the loving do, and that dead dogs are those who do not knowthat dying is what, to live, each has to do.
Alastair Reid
I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
Nick Hornby
We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase 'to live like men.
Edward Abbey
I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.
Siri Hustvedt
It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.
Elisa Albert
Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then —May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.
Edward Abbey
When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
David Foster Wallace
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.
Walt Whitman
The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
Arnold Bennett
The soul is a prolonged anniversary of our lives in this world.
Sorin Cerin
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H. Gass
Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools' errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself.
Marilynne Robinson
What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.
Edward Abbey
The dead” we say   as if speakingof “the people” whogave up on making historysimply to get throughSomething dense and null   groanwithout echo   undergroundand owl-voiced I cry Whoare these dead people theselovers who if ever didlisten no longer answer: We :
Adrienne Rich
In all truth might it be said that beauty is the unique aliment of our soul, for in all places does it search for beauty, and it perishes not of hunger even in the most degraded of lives. For indeed nothing of beauty can pass by and be altogether unperceived. Perhaps does it never pass by save only in our unconsciousness, but its action is no less puissant in gloom of night than by light of day; the joy it procures may be less tangible, but other difference there is none.
Maurice Maeterlinck
My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals.
H.L. Mencken
The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.
Jonathan Franzen
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Without duty life is soft and bone less.
Joseph Joubert
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Emil M. Cioran
I protect myself by refusing to know myself.
Floriano Martins
The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.
Charles Lamb
Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention; and what we term justice is truly nothing but this equilibrium transformed, as honey is nothing but a transformation of the sweetness found in the flower. Outside man there is no justice; within him injustice cannot be.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.
Thomas Mann
Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.
Dejan Stojanovic