Quotes by Essayists - Page 20

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realize that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you.

Roland Barthes

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by "The Lord of the Rings" is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.

Adam Gopnik

Always do what you are afraid to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love the relationship that anyone has with music ... because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. ... It's the best part of us probably ...

Nick Hornby

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He felt himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon circumstances any longer. Old battered man loafing at the doors of public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from him.

Virginia Woolf

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order

Virginia Woolf

You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.

Anne Carson

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

Thomas Mann

Faith as an intellectual state is self-reliance.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

He was taking Kevin’s cherry! The words made him harder and made him feel privileged, masterful, married. He thought how many men would pay unlimited amounts to have this inaugurating experience with this boy. He didn’t want to feel like a middle-aged paedophile, he didn’t even want to think all this would make a good porn film. He wanted every thrust, every second, to be laden with tenderness, a salute from him to Kevin, a deep recognition. He wanted Kevin to like what was being done to him, to push back for another joyous millimetre of penetration. He didn’t want him to label it Guy’s First Fuck or Kevin’s First Time. He didn’t want the idea and the label to crowd out the sensation or to sharpen it; he wanted it to be pure sex, undramatised.

Edmund White

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.

Ben Lerner

i know more than i know and must learn it from myself

Marilynne Robinson

If each of us were to confess his most secret desire the one that inspires all his plans all his actions he would say: "I want to be praised."

E. M. Cioran

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

Siri Hustvedt

Happiness is the china shop love is the bull.

H.L. Mencken

The present is the living sum-total of the whole past.

Thomas Carlyle

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

David Foster Wallace

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

Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.

Barbara Kingsolver

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.

Mark Strand

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.

Marilynne Robinson

We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.

Dejan Stojanovic

Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.

José Martí

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

Roland Barthes

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas.

Arthur Miller

And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it'd be 'See, you're leaving after all when you promised you wouldn't.' I knew it but I'm trying to explain anyway, okay? And I know you probably won't understand this either, but --wait-- just try to listen and maybe absorb this, okay? Ready? Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears about me. It is not. It's because of them. Okay? Can you see that? It's your fear I can't take. It's your distrust and fear I've been trying to fight. And I can't anymore. I'm out of gas on it. If I loved you even a little less maybe I could take it. But this is killing me, this constant feeling that I am always scaring you and never making you feel secure. Can you see that?

David Foster Wallace

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

Monique Wittig

A matter, as the famous book intoned, of finding the shade of the parachute that best complemented you. But really: With no parachute at all you'd hit the pavement so hard it probably wouldn't even hurt, and you'd unleash a whole new color palate-bone, blood, muscle-in the process.

Elisa Albert

In the dark I rest,unready for the light which dawnsday after day,eager to be shared.Black silk, shelter me.I needmore of the night before I openeyes and heartto illumination. I must stillgrow in the dark like a rootnot ready, not ready at all.

Denise Levertov

Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom

Charles Baudelaire

And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.

Chuck Klosterman

the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water

Virginia Woolf

Eliminate the overwhelming cost of phantom wars and fools' errands, and humankind might begin to balance its books. After all, its only debts are to itself.

Marilynne Robinson

The Epistle of our being is written with letters full of blood drained from the love of God's Word.

Sorin Cerin

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Pico Iyer

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

Anne Carson

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

William H. Gass

It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script.

Louise Glück

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It has never been given to a man to attain at once his happiness and his salvation.

Charles Péguy

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Siri Hustvedt

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

Barbara Kingsolver

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.

David Foster Wallace

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

Marilynne Robinson

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. …It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.

Nick Hornby

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

Walter Benjamin

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the Russian delegate this summer indicated the Soviet Union's interest in sending medical equipment, Dr Shigeto went right away to see the delegate and settle the matter tactfully. He is careful to steer clear of the superficial swirl of political maneuvering, but never misses any opportunity to improve the capability of the A-bomb Hospital or to enhance concretely the welfare of the patients. In that sense, he sometimes refers to himself as a 'dirty handkerchief.' That is, he serves to filter political purposes out of relief efforts so that the effect on patients is purely and concretely humane.

Kenzaburō Ōe

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

Charles Baudelaire

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.

Jonathan Franzen

There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.

George Santayana

Speech is silvern silence is golden.

Thomas Carlyle

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