Quotes by Essayists - Page 88

To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.
Kingsolver Barbara
I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.
Marilynne Robinson
Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.
E B White
Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
How much weight can carry a thought which does not acknowledge that it is an illusion?
Sorin Cerin
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love.Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,women at least should know the differencebetween love and death. No poison cup,no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recordershould have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recordernot merely played but should have listened to us,and could instruct those after us:this we were, this is how we tried to love,and these are the forces they had ranged against us,and these are the forces we had ranged within us,within us and against us, against us and within us.
Adrienne Rich
An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, —"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief in yourself is more important than endless worries of what others think of you. Value yourself and others will value you. Validation is best that comes from within.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Outside among your fellows among strangers you must preserve appearances 100 things you cannot do but inside the terrible freedom!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
without the power to concentrate thatis to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.
Arnold Bennett
Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening.
Floriano Martins
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Virginia Woolf
How many truths pass wrecking through the Illusion of Life, but none of them is an absolute truth therefore the real truth!
Sorin Cerin
What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?
David Foster Wallace
To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
Cheryl Strayed
A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.
Salman Rushdie
Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.
Nick Hornby
The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.
Jorge Luis Borges
Our children form a large part of our Immortality Project. This is one of the reasons a child’s death cuts so deep; some of the future dies with them. Through them and their descendants, part of us lives on forever, just as it does in the friends we touch and the ripples our actions cause in the world. All these effects are conscripts, earthwork defences against the finality of extinction.
John Dolan
...they all were, in the grip of a huge fantasy: the idea that men would not be judged by who they once were and what they had once done, if they only decided to be different. They wanted to step away from the responsibilities of history and be free.
Salman Rushdie
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well half an hour?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs.
Cheryl Strayed
Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
Virginia Woolf
Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.
H.L. Mencken
I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
Virginia Woolf
But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
Virginia Woolf
Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.
Chuck Klosterman
Strong men greet war tempest hard times. They wish as Pindar said to tread the floors of hell with necessities as hard as iron.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.
David Foster Wallace
The truth is cruel but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it.
George Santayana
The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.
Adrienne Rich
The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?
Stanisław Lem
In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects.
Salman Rushdie
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
Jorge Luis Borges
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.
William Styron
All the time she writing the world had continued.
Virginia Woolf
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
Roland Barthes
It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.
David Foster Wallace
When we hear that "war" is made for "peace", or that "pain" is sought for "pleasure" or that "brutality" helps one "feel", in our minds, language ceases to describe reality. Words lose their direct relationship with actuality. And thus language and culture begin to exist entirely independently of nature.
Susan Griffin
The sky didn't wonder where it was.
Cheryl Strayed
Poetry, I tell my students,is idiosyncratic. Poetryis where we are ourselves,(though Sterling Brown said"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")digging in the clam flatsfor the shell that snaps,emptying the proverbial pocketbook.Poetry is what you findin the dirt in the corner,overhear on the bus, Godin the details, the only wayto get from here to there.Poetry (and now my voice is rising)is not all love, love, loveand I'm sorry the dog died.Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)is the human voice,and are we not of interest to each other?
Elizabeth Alexander
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.
Nick Hornby
In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.
Gary Snyder
How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful.
Walker Percy
What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.
Walter Benjamin
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Thomas Carlyle
A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a
E B White
Men like nails lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.
Walter Savage Landor
How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?
Virginia Woolf
The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.
Marilynne Robinson
For, to be woken up at five in the morning by the devotional treacle of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan and other confectioners, all of them simultaneously droning out from several different cassette players; to be relentlessly assaulted for the rest of the day and most of the night by the alternately over-earnest and insolent voices of Kumar Sanu, Alisha Chinoy, Baba Sehgal singing 'Sexy, Sexy, Sexy', and 'Ladki hai kya re baba', 'Sarkaye leyo khatiya' and other hideous songs; to have them insidiously leak into your memory and become moronic refrains running over and over again in your mind; to have your environment polluted and your day destroyed in this way was to know a deepening rage, an impulse to murder, and, finally, a creeping fear at one's own dangerous level of derangement. It was to understand the perfectly sane people you read about in the papers, who suddenly explode into violence one fine day; it was to conceive a lasting hatred for the perpetrators, rich or poor, of these auditory atrocities. (on why he left Varanasi after a few days)
Pankaj Mishra
For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
Virginia Woolf
...It's not something shared with society, but rather its a personal possession. I've never thought that I wanted to share morality with someone. I feel it's like a white canvas on which nothing is yet drawn, a silent room which accepts any sounds of music and nature, a litmus paper that has not yet been dipped into a solution. In future, it will be a white canvas on which anyone should be allowed to draw anything.
Ayako Sono
You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy’s disgust.
Jonathan Franzen
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland Barthes
Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.
H.L. Mencken