Quotes by Essayists - Page 93

A thought that is almost beautiful – a thought that you speak not, but that you cherish within you at this moment, will irradiate you as though you were a transparent vase.
Maurice Maeterlinck
It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead
Nick Hornby
Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.
Agnes Repplier
For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.
David Foster Wallace
All thoughts all passions all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed his sacred flame.
Hartley Coleridge
Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library.
Siri Hustvedt
We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.
Maurice Maeterlinck
When the man is at home his standing in society is well known and quietly taken but when he is abroad it is problematical and is dependent on the success of his manners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.
Osip Mandelstam
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste.
Dejan Stojanovic
It is by faith that poetry as well as devotion soars above this dull earth that imagination breaks through its clouds breathes a purer air and lives in a softer light.
Henry Giles
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
H.L. Mencken
Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean’s salt seems thinly shaken, of letdowns local as the sofa where I copped my freshman’s feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking.
William H. Gass
Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore, spying on the jungle’s edge through their fitted brass lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, turned, set their riggings, sailed on. Imagine all who came after doing the same. What would that Africa be now? All I can think of is the other okapi, the one they used to believe in. A unicorn that could look you in the eye.
Barbara Kingsolver
A world in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say[.]
Virginia Woolf
This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a Western European, is that there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like "Yeah, but, you know, it's so much funnier and nicer to go do something else." and "Who cares?" and "It's all bullshit anyway.
David Foster Wallace
Passion though a bad regulator is a powerful spring.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be an inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I'll make the journey first, then depart.
David Foster Wallace
If I can in any way contribute to the Diversion or Improvement of the Country in which I live I shall leave it when I am summoned out of it with the secret Satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain.
Joseph Addison
It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most.
Chuck Klosterman
All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
E B White
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a “soundless music”. It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.
You Jin
She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own
Salman Rushdie
Today the grass listens when I speak of love. It seems to me that this word isn't honest even with itself.
Herta Müller
... In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it. You're generally less humble in that decade than you'll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery.
Cheryl Strayed
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.
William Styron
Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.
George Santayana
To be simple is to be great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most things get better by themselves. Most things in fact are better by morning.
Lewis Thomas
Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.
Jorge Luis Borges
Is the sunrise superior just because it goes before the sunset with a day and sunset goes before the sunrise with a night? Could there be day without night and sunrise without sunset, life without death?
Sorin Cerin
The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science and art. With Stephen it's all empathy and imagination and exploration and the shock of the new, and the outcome is... uncertain, if you know what I mean. I'm engaged by it, but I', mot necessarily sure what its all about. David, on the other hand, presses this button, then that one, and bingo! It's like operating a lift - just as romantic, but actually just as useful.
Nick Hornby
The past is a work of art free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
Max Beerbohm
Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude.
John Dolan
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
Edward Abbey
Sertorius rose up and spoke to his army, “You see, fellow soldiers, that perseverance is more prevailing than violence, and that many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little. Assiduity and persistence are irresistible, and in time overthrow and destroy the greatest powers whatever. Time being the favorable friend and assistant of those who use their judgment to await his occasions, and the destructive enemy of those who are unseasonably urging and pressing forward.
Plutarch
Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other.
Maurice Maeterlinck
In the biggest and the smallest I sleep but at the same place I stay.
Dejan Stojanovic
In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.
Flannery O'Connor
It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.
Plutarch
In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.
H.L. Mencken
It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.
Siri Hustvedt
The best writing is rewriting.
E B White
Guy’s whole body was humming. Normally he thought only of his head – his eyes, his smile – and was aware of his body as merely the principle of forward propulsion trundling him along. But now he was all these bright pools of sensuality – his nipples, his half-hard cock, his tingling anus, even his feet. He was glowing all over and he felt the animal in him was longing to shed its clothes.
Edmund White
When someone uses the phrase ‘the prick one’, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word ‘metaphorically’, you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.
Nick Hornby
We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.
Dejan Stojanovic
Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo.
Joseph Brodsky
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual for what the gods had given him.
Max Beerbohm
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
Salman Rushdie
At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.
E B White
The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.
Leslie Jamison
The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
Flannery O'Connor
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Paul Valéry