Quotes by Essayists - Page 87

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.
Ben Lerner
Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself. The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself.
David Foster Wallace
…the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape….You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.
Virginia Woolf
Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.
Walker Percy
It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs against the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels 'There are figures without features robed in beauty'. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, 'He is old'. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things – this is our perpetual illusion – is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky.
Virginia Woolf
Freedom from one man is just another one.
Leslie Jamison
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We occasionally see something on the stage that reminds us a
William Hazlitt
Time is the silent never-resting thing ... rolling rushing on swift silent like an all-embracing oceantide on which we and all the universe swim.
Thomas Carlyle
The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall not return.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Broad acres are a patent of nobility and no man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface it is 4000 miles deep and that is a very handsome property.
Charles Dudley Warner
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
Cheryl Strayed
Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
William Hazlitt
Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.
Plutarch
Man can never be more perfect than the sun. The sun burns us with the same light that warms us. The sun has spots (stains). The ungrateful only talk about the spots (stains). The grateful talk about the light.
José Martí
Rest is the sweet sauce of labour.
Plutarch
As to the charge that I am a cranky old man, I plead guilty.
Edward Abbey
DEATH. . .And now you are here to fight for this woman.You know her promise is given.She has to die or her husband won't go free.APOLLORelax, I'm not breaking any laws.DEATHWhy the bow, if you're breaking no laws?APOLLOI always carry a bow, it's my trademark.
Anne Carson
Proctor: I am only wondering how I may prove what she told me, Elizabeth. If the girl's a saint now, I think it is not easy to prove she's fraud, and the town gone so silly. She told it to me in a room alone- I have no proof for it.Elizabeth: You were alone wit
Arthur Miller
He who knows himself is wise; yet have we no sooner acquired real consciousness of our being than we learn that true wisdom is a thing that lies far deeper than consciousness. The chief gain of increased consciousness is that it unveils an ever-loftier unconsciousness, on whose heights do the sources lie of the purest wisdom.
Maurice Maeterlinck
What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough
George Steiner
What shell did not feel the sound waves and which bird did not face at least once the wind?
Sorin Cerin
…This singular reversal may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the “subject” (since Christianity) is the one who suffers: where there is a wound, there is a subject: die Wunde! die Wunde! says Parsifal, thereby becoming “himself”; and the deeper the wound, at the body’s center (at the “heart”), the more the subject becomes a subject: for the subject is intimacy (“The wound…is of a frightful intimacy”). Such is love’s wound: a radical chasm (at the “roots” of being), which cannot be closed, and out of which the subject drains, constituting himself as a subject in this very draining.”―from_A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments_. Translated by Richard Howard, p. 189
Roland Barthes
I hate and fear violence myself, have always avoided barroom brawls, and tho' I'm a bit of a gun-nut, and a member of the NRA, I never shoot at anything but beer cans and mule deer. (In season.) And seldom hit either, except by accident.
Edward Abbey
A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only.The Twenty-first Voyage
Stanisław Lem
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
Florence King
By the aid of philosophy you will live not unpleasantly, for you will learn to extract pleasure from all places and things: wealth will make you happy, because it will enable you to benefit many; and poverty, as you will not then have many anxieties; and glory, for it will make you honoured; and obscurity, for you will then be safe from envy.
Plutarch
Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.
Carlos Fuentes
Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they're honest about everything.
Chuck Klosterman
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Jorge Luis Borges
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.
Flannery O'Connor
A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.
Thomas Mann
Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.
Leslie Jamison
You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justif your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you've got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.
Cheryl Strayed
Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising - for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Virginia Woolf
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O'Connor
Suicide is a confession of failure. And like divorce, it is shrouded in excuses and rationalizations spun endlessly to disguise the simple fact that all one's energy, passion, appetite and ambition have been aborted.
Al Álvarez
They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
Virginia Woolf
Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.
Edward Abbey
Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.
Thomas de Quincey
Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may he will only feel satisfaction as he is satisfied in himself.
William Hazlitt
I think it's neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me--just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we'd be better off.
Cheryl Strayed
This is not a meritocracy.
Sallie Tisdale
NocturneWhere are you now,my poems,my sleepwalkers?No mumbles tonight?Where are you, thirst,fever, humming tedium?The sodium streetlightsburr outside my window,steadfast, unreachable,little astonishmentslighting the way uphill.Where are you now,when I need you most? It’s late. I’m old. Come soon, you feral cats among the dahlias.
W. S. Di Piero
Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
Walter Benjamin
There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient
Marilynne Robinson
It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it.
Dejan Stojanovic
If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.
Chuck Klosterman
And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.
Charles Baudelaire
If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people—perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven—but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination.
Jorge Luis Borges
The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible.
Flannery O'Connor
He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!
Charles Baudelaire
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
Anne Fadiman
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.... It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.
Samuel McChord Crothers
Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.
Joseph Joubert
Every now and then, I'll run into someone who claims not to like chocolate, and while we live in a country where everyone has the right to eat what they want, I want to say for the record that I don't trust these people, that I think something is wrong with them, and that they're probably - and this must be said - total duds in bed.
Steve Almond
We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.
Ralph Waldo Emerson