Quotes by Essayists - Page 2

To spoil means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations. The young child exposed to this regime has no experience of its own limits. By reason of the removal of all external restraint, all clashing with other things, he comes actually to believe that he is the only one that exists, and gets used to not considering others, especially not considering them as superior to himself. This feeling of another's superiority could only be instilled into him by someone who, being stronger than he is, should force him to give up some desire, to restrict himself, to restrain himself. He would then have learned this fundamental discipline: "Here I end and here begins another more powerful than I am. In the world, apparently, there are two people: I myself and another superior to me.

Ortega y Gasset

I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am.

Dejan Stojanovic

If any of us had heard the word "feminist" we would have thought it meant a girl who wore too much makeup, but we were, without knowing it, feminists ourselves, bound together by the freemasonry that exists among intelligent women who know they are intelligent. It is the only kind of female bonding that works, which is why most men do not like intelligent women. They don't mind one female brain if they can enjoy it privately; it's the idea of two or more on the loose that upsets them. The girls in the college-bound group might not have been friends in every case--Sharon Cohen and I gave each other willies--but our instincts told us that we had the same enemies.

Florence King

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

Jorge Luis Borges

Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.

Paul Valéry

Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw.

Virginia Woolf

Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.

William Hazlitt

Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest.

Jorge Luis Borges

Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary.

Barry López

Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.

Barry López

God enters by a private door into every individual.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.

Dejan Stojanovic

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.

Salman Rushdie

Nobody can open the gates of death without closing them again after him.

Sorin Cerin

Gringos! They have copied us again

Luis Alberto Urrea

Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.

Barbara Kingsolver

remembering and forgiving can be contrary things

Marilynne Robinson

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

Walker Percy

Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl––pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!––who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones!

Virginia Woolf

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

Virginia Woolf

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

Adam Gopnik

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

Anne Fadiman

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

David Foster Wallace

There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.

Jorge Luis Borges

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel's mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.

Virginia Woolf

Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)

Virginia Woolf

So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not "unreal" (I could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; *I do not manage* to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness." —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_

Roland Barthes

My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.

Siri Hustvedt

Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter. I had placed my trust that December night in glass after glass of it, eager not for drink but for a bit of talk.

Monique Truong

Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards–their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble–the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

Virginia Woolf

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

Salman Rushdie

Ingratitude is a crime more despicable than revenge, which is only returning evil for evil, while ingratitude returns evil for good.

William George Jordan

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

Joseph Joubert

Properly speaking, there are no barbarian standards. Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made. The varying degrees of culture are measured by the greater or less precision of the standards. Where there is little such precision, these standards rule existence only grosso modo; where there is much they penetrate in detail into the exercise of all the activities.

Ortega y Gasset

We need new friends. Some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact an ideal version of their lives.

Logan Pearsall Smith

I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it--a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you?

Adam Gopnik

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.

H.L. Mencken

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man needs his Siren To check his courage and strength When he hears her song In his travels through the unknown.

Dejan Stojanovic

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

Salman Rushdie

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

George Santayana

The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.

Wole Soyinka

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes imposs

Salman Rushdie

Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority ofmen. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.

Valentine de Saint-Point

What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.

Charles Whibley

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?

Maurice Maeterlinck

What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough

George Steiner

No more semblance or disemblance, no more God or Man, only an immanent logic of the principle of operativity.

Walter Benjamin

A superior atmosphere exists, in which we all know each other; and there is a mysterious truth – deeper far than the material truth - to which we at once have recourse, when we try to form a conception of a stranger. Have we not all experienced these things, which take place in the impenetrable regions of almost astral humanity?

Maurice Maeterlinck

the very least we can live with is an agreement that does not reduce us to slaves of imposition, but makes us partners of consent. Yes, we are compelled to make peace, we submit to force majeure, but leave us at least a piece of clothing to cover our nudity. This is the motivation behind every formula of diplomatic contrivance that is sometimes described as face-saving, and wise indeed is the victor who knows that, in order to shield his own rear from the elements, he must not denude his opponents.

Wole Soyinka

The night was blustery and raw, with a chill wet wind blowing down the avenues, and when Rose and I met Françoise and her son and a friend at La Lorraine, a glittering brassiere not far from L'Étoile, rain was descending from the heavens in torrents. Someone in the group, sensing my state of mind, apologized for the evil night, but I recall thinking that even if this were one of those warmly scented and passionate evenings for which Paris is celebrated I would respond like the zombie I had become. The weather of depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.

William Styron

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Emil M. Cioran

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.

Robert Lynd

An individual dies ... when instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being he cowers within and takes refuge there.

E. M. Cioran

Wit is the salt of conversation not the food.

William Hazlitt

His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: 'You see how I'm sticking it out; don't praise me, it's my nature; thanks all the same.' But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.

Georges Bernanos

If you would lift me you must be on a higher ground.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused.

Chuck Klosterman

I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path.

Nick Hornby

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