Quotes by Essayists - Page 15

Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.

Thomas Carlyle

I act as the tongue of you,... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

Walt Whitman

I must be able to say, 'Percival, a ridiculous name'. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind him. How strange to oar one's way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes.

Virginia Woolf

Who prays at help in the Illusion of his Life does not understand that his only aid is death

Sorin Cerin

If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.

Maurice Maeterlinck

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

Walter Benjamin

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.

Barbara Kingsolver

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53)

Sarah Vowell

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.

Czesław Miłosz

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.

Florence King

This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.

David Foster Wallace

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Virginia Woolf

Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.

Joseph Addison

He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.

Virginia Woolf

There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom.

William George Jordan

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

H.L. Mencken

We change whether we like it or not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.

Virginia Woolf

Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.

José Ortega y Gasset

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like the a solid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.

Sarah Vowell

One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.

Niyi Osundare

It is not important what happens where; Where we fall or rise, What we conquer or lose, How big or small we are.

Dejan Stojanovic

Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.

Adam Gopnik

[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

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

Siri Hustvedt

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,

Mary Ruefle

My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.

Siri Hustvedt

We live behind the closed doors of our own destiny.

Sorin Cerin

freedom is nothing but the distancebetween the hunter and the hunted

Bei Dao

I'm really too young to go out into the world alone," he thought as he lay down

E B White

And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? Ok, so who's the arsehole now?

Nick Hornby

It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.

Nick Hornby

Words will build no walls.

Plutarch

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

Nick Hornby

In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!

Nick Hornby

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

Virginia Woolf

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.

Salman Rushdie

I lack the imagination. For that reason I have to pack, stuff into my pockets odds and ends, passport, money, and go see what it's really like. Whenever the time of year or the weather changes, I have to pack up whatever I can't do without and visit all those places I've been before, to make sure they still exist

Andrzej Stasiuk

What is reading but silent conversation?

Walter Savage Landor

And I read hundreds and thousands of books, day and night, always awake and always eager to seek health. But in no book I found what I was looking for. Then, shut up in my parents' house, I thought and suffered for hundreds and thousands of hours, always awake and always mindful of the tremendous anxiety of health. But I still have not found what I was looking for.

Giovanni Papini

Why is man the being who won in the world of emptiness, dethroning all animal species? For he is closest to the perfection of emptiness.

Sorin Cerin

[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.

Edward Abbey

Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on someone without getting some on yourself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

Jonathan Franzen

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in proper figures.

Joseph Addison

Never read a book that is not a year old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

Emil M. Cioran

I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;

Walt Whitman

I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.

Charles Lamb

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past according to his interest in the present.

George Santayana

It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there...

Jonathan Franzen

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

Thomas Carlyle

I am, a shadowthat grows longer as the sunmoves, drawn outon a thread of wonder.If I bear burdensthey begin to be rememberedas gifts, goods, a basketof bread that hurtsmy shoulders but closes mein fragrance. I caneat as I go. ("Stepping Westward")

Denise Levertov

I’m still pretty sick about what I’ve lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I’m not the best sleeper.

Nick Hornby

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

George Santayana

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.

Walt Whitman

Not all questions can be answered.

Edward Abbey

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes by making them the fruit of his character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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