Quotes by Essayists - Page 86

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53)
Sarah Vowell
You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
Sarah Vowell
But love – don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? What does one mean? ... It’s only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows; why, one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion.
Virginia Woolf
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is a make-believe animal - he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
William Hazlitt
Move on. Walk forward into the light.
Barbara Kingsolver
Reality is always richer, more unpredictable than our deductions
Leonardo Sciascia
Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
Virginia Woolf
A great philosophy is not a philosophy without reproach it is philosophy without fear.
Charles Péguy
Songs of myselfClear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
Walt Whitman
Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.
Sarah Vowell
[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.
William Deresiewicz
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
Barbara Kingsolver
Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
Barbara Kingsolver
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.
Thomas Carlyle
We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.
Dejan Stojanovic
A big desire is not enough to meet the expectations of lost dreams.
Dejan Stojanovic
The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
Virginia Woolf
I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines.
Nicholson Baker
Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.
Leslie Jamison
There are some men above grief and some men below it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everybody talks, but there is no conversation.
Dejan Stojanovic
Many people pretend to be in thought, proving thought to be a beautiful thing. But the bald man doesn’t need a comb, the tiger doesn’t need weapons, the fool doesn’t need thought. The person with no needs is practically a sage, but the sage also needs to count the rivers across the iron bridge to pass the time. This is the difference between the sage and the fool.
Xi Chuan
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
Virginia Woolf
Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.
Dejan Stojanovic
How many minutes will still die in the swamp of your illusion of being human?
Sorin Cerin
Small, therefore, can we think the progress we have made, as long as our admiration for those who have done noble things is barren, and does not of itself incite us to imitate them.
Plutarch
Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
George Santayana
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
George Santayana
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer but rather what they miss.
Thomas Carlyle
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.
Salman Rushdie
We are less likely to fail if we measure with judgement our chances and our capabilities.
Agnes Repplier
Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.
Shalom Auslander
Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from “problems”, but from his own inner torment and fire. It’s a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and here never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart!
Emil M. Cioran
When the Russian delegate this summer indicated the Soviet Union's interest in sending medical equipment, Dr Shigeto went right away to see the delegate and settle the matter tactfully. He is careful to steer clear of the superficial swirl of political maneuvering, but never misses any opportunity to improve the capability of the A-bomb Hospital or to enhance concretely the welfare of the patients. In that sense, he sometimes refers to himself as a 'dirty handkerchief.' That is, he serves to filter political purposes out of relief efforts so that the effect on patients is purely and concretely humane.
Kenzaburō Ōe
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough.
Walt Whitman
You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
Nick Hornby
Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.
Gary Snyder
Touch Me, but not with your hands.
Orville Lloyd Douglas
Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
Jorge Luis Borges
Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To hear never-heard sounds, To see never-seen colors and shapes, To try to understand the imperceptible Power pervading the world; To fly and find pure ethereal substances That are not of matter But of that invisible soul pervading reality. To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; To be a lantern in the darkness Or an umbrella in a stormy day; To feel much more than know. To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain; To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon; To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves; To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching. To be a smile on the face of a woman And shine in her memory As a moment saved without planning.
Dejan Stojanovic
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
Anne Carson
Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Walt Whitman
For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.
Sarah Vowell
Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix.
Adrienne Rich
Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
H.L. Mencken
No reason for a feverish rush For we will all arrive in the same place At the right time. Justice will be served. There will be no better or worse, No big and small, no rewards, no punishment, No guilt, no judges, no hierarchies; Only silent equality.
Dejan Stojanovic
And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the lie of truth lies the truth.
Dejan Stojanovic
He that can work is a born king of something.
Thomas Carlyle
Happiness is the only sanction in life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
No one feels good at four in the morning.If ants feel good at four in the morning—three cheers for the ants.
Wisława Szymborska
Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form.
William Styron
It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
Charles Dudley Warner