Quotes by Essayists - Page 90

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.
Mark Strand
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted it is being formed.
Flannery O'Connor
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Flannery O'Connor
The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
William Hazlitt
And if something is only itself, it doesn't particularly matter.
Chuck Klosterman
What she liked was simply life. "That's what i did it for," she said, speaking aloud to life... Could any man understand what she meant, either, about life? …But to go deeper, beneath what people said, and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary, they are. In her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? It was an offering…it was her gift.
Virginia Woolf
Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.
Virginia Woolf
The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person's dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man's ability to experience time--dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly exceeds their actual duration and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoke puts it, the intoxicated user's brain seems "to have something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch.
Thomas Mann
She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.
Jonathan Franzen
Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
H.L. Mencken
The key to the scientist's purpose is the idea that every phenomenon is the product of a certain given set of condition. In his laboratory he hopes to reconstitute the set of conditions, however complex they may be, which, once they are fully reconstituted, cannot fail to give rise to the phenomenon he is after, life. In other words he seeks to start off a mechanically fated chain-reaction; and of course, in enumerating the conditions that have made it possible for him to manufacture his phenomenon he systematically discounts the huge mental toils, the plodding, methodical research, of himself and others.Thus, by a singular contradiction, he succeeds in convincing himself and, of course, attempts to persuade others, that he has arrived at the origin of his phenomenon; he sets out to demonstrate that everything in the universe runs perfectly smoothly by itself, without any creative power at anytime intruding.
Gabriel Marcel
Language is fossil Poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
His lovely wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his find young man comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being, to what would have been general rejoicing.
Marilynne Robinson
Music the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have below.
Joseph Addison
You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.
Walt Whitman
Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.
Léon Bloy
Character is that which can do without success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We look wishfully to emergencies to eventful revolutionary times ... and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
Virginia Woolf
Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there.
Gary Snyder
The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.
Osip Mandelstam
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Look upon men and things with the inner eye, with its form and desire, never forgetting that the shadow they throw as they pass by, upon hillock or wall, is but the fleeting image of a mightier shadow, which, like the wing of an imperishable swan, floats over every soul that draws near to their soul. Do not believe that thoughts such as these can be mere ornaments, and without influence upon the lives of those who admit them. It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.
Maurice Maeterlinck
It is only too evident that the invisible agitations of the kingdoms within us are arbitrarily set on foot by the thoughts we shelter. Our myriad intuitions are the veiled queens who steer our course through life, though we have no words in which to speak of them. How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words!
Maurice Maeterlinck
In Western Civilization, our elders are books.
Gary Snyder
I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety of Earth, I'd go with Buddha, but only because he wouldn't want it.
Sarah Vowell
On peut chercher dans Dieu le complice et l'ami qui manquent toujours. Dieu est l'éternel confident dans cette tragédie dont chacun est le héros.
Charles Baudelaire
I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
Emil M. Cioran
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
Walter Pater
There are those who speak and those who dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of self-defense -- as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved, and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm. Putting to one side the opportunities offered by the coercive power of fear, charity obliges me to assume that their alarm is genuine, though i grant that in doing so I again raise questions about the soundness of their judgment.
Marilynne Robinson
When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow I look back.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist makingdevastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious orpompous.
David Foster Wallace
The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey's, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God's angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
Adam Gopnik
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one's self?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This feeling of being "home at last" corresponds to my idea about the city, and idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.
Siri Hustvedt
I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.
Salman Rushdie
To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.
Stanisław Lem
The tourist may complain of other tourists but he would be lost without them.
Agnes Repplier
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.
Salman Rushdie
I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
Edmund Wilson
I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading something that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV program...All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over [insert popular contemporary TV program] next time you have a choice.
Nick Hornby
Our power comes from the earth
Luis Alberto Urrea
Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.
Flannery O'Connor
I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
Ben Lerner
Hey you —All our fevered history won't instill insight,won't turn a body conscious,won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothingto solve even as each moment is an answer.
Claudia Rankine
Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good. 'Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don't know about you, but I only have one life, and I don't want to spend it in a sewer of injustice.
Wallace Shawn
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H.L. Mencken
The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.
Chuck Klosterman
Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In an endless silence even screams sound silent.
Dejan Stojanovic
That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.
Emil M. Cioran
...I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is rather much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.
Daniel Mendelsohn
The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.
Virginia Woolf