Quotes by Essayists - Page 12

The first law of success ... is concentration: to bend all the energies to one point and to go directly to that point looking neither to the right nor the left.

William Matthews

When you read and understand a poem comprehending its rich and formal meanings then you master chaos a little.

Stephen Spender

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

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

Salman Rushdie

To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.

Stanisław Lem

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.

Pico Iyer

Blessed is he who believes in the illusion because thus he can find his great truth!

Sorin Cerin

Rain drops are not the ones who bring the clouds.

Sorin Cerin

This was a favourite dress, one of Sally Parker's, the last almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now retired, living at Ealing, and if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa (but never would she have a moment any more), I shall go and see her at Ealing.

Virginia Woolf

Is my victory real, does the winner adorned with a laurel wreath ask this question? Do I deserve victory or did I steal it from someone who is more worthy of victory?

Dejan Stojanovic

You can be happy indeed if you have breathing space from pain.

Giacomo Leopardi

In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.

Jonathan Franzen

Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.

Thomas Mann

Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.

Salman Rushdie

He was very religious he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

Jorge Luis Borges

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?

Charles Baudelaire

The only thing a person of my age can do is fall in love secretly, silently, likeI had done with Mariana. Fall in love knowing that all is lost and there is no hope.

José Emilio Pacheco

It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband and wife. Why did So-and-so enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one's power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves.

Salman Rushdie

The gross evil of our time defies all labels.

Edward Abbey

I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.

Virginia Woolf

... man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and tractable by housing and gentler usage...

Plutarch

Tonight I heard Louis's horn. My father heard it, too. The wind was right, and I could hear the notes of taps, just as darkness fell. There is nothing in all the world I like better than the trumpet of the swan.

E B White

Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.

Jonathan Franzen

Ideals make reason inaccessible.

Floriano Martins

He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.

Danzy Senna

Mass media has convinced us to think that silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase “We just don’t talk anymore”).

Chuck Klosterman

I wonder if the real measure of "home" is the degree to which you can leave it alone. Maybe appreciating a house means knowing when to stop decorating. Maybe you've never really lived there until you've thrown its broken pieces in the garbage. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home.

Meghan Daum

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.

Thomas Mann

Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.

Dejan Stojanovic

...it occurred that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds," be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff--they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip from some reason.

David Foster Wallace

Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren’t hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ostensibly a complaint, but I think he liked his metaphor, and liked that our moments of distance were subtle enough to require this kind of formulation. Meaning that I was a complex creature and so was he; that he became even more complex in his attempt to bridge the gap between our complexities; that he could create a complicated image to house this complex of complications. This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it.

Leslie Jamison

Hope without love is hopeless.

Dejan Stojanovic

The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.

Salman Rushdie

In the faces of men and women I see God and in my own face in the glass I find letters from God dropt in the street and every one is signed by God's name and I leave them where they are for I know that wheresoever I go others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Walt Whitman

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

Walker Percy

The true America is the Middle West and Columbus discovered nothing at all except another Europe.

W. L. George

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Nicholson Baker

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

Logan Pearsall Smith

We never touch but at points.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rough work iconoclasm but the only way to get at the truth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

William Hazlitt

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

Jorge Luis Borges

Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time.

E B White

A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.

Barbara Kingsolver

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many consuming fires can there be in the words: freedom, peace and democracy and how easy they can be extinguished by ignorance, stupidity and arrogance?

Sorin Cerin

If the world is divided between Fascism and Communism, obviously Fascism must lose since it is the last, desperate refuge of the bourgeoisie

Czesław Miłosz

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

Chuck Klosterman

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

David Foster Wallace

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

Thomas Mann

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life if freedom fail?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there’s always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is… Well, it’s just you. And when you go, it’s gone. Nothing abstract about it.

Nick Hornby

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Thomas Carlyle

There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity.

Ortega y Gasset

If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!" (William Strunk) ... Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?

E B White

a stone / which in its own archaic, simpleminded way / sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

Wisława Szymborska

I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134}

Siri Hustvedt

Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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