Quotes by Essayists - Page 21

A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.

Salman Rushdie

Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this–love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

Virginia Woolf

My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Before a secret is told one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.

Susan Griffin

The reward of a general is not a bigger tent - but command.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.

Chuck Klosterman

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.

Katherine Anne Porter

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Joseph Brodsky

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Pico Iyer

Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.

Charles Baudelaire

A day is a miniature eternity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Over the inter glaciers,I see the summer glow,And, through the wild-piled snowdrift,The warm rosebuds below.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.

Walt Whitman

Camerado this is no book. Who touches this touches a man.

Walt Whitman

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Virginia Woolf

Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.

Siri Hustvedt

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People talk about how wonderful the world must seem to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That's clearer to me every day. Each morning I am like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes.

Marilynne Robinson

Character is what can do without success

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything has its poetry. 94

Joseph Joubert

You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.

Witold Gombrowicz

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.

Walker Percy

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

Adrienne Rich

Courage consists not in hazarding without fear but being resolutely minded in a just cause.

Plutarch

Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.

Plutarch

I had a theory; I’m not sure if it was my own but it worked for me. Public spaces, such as streets and subway stations, became inhabitable as I assigned them some value and imprinted an experience on them. If I recited a snatch of Paterson every time I walked along a certain avenue, eventually that avenue would sound like William Carlos Williams. The entrance to the subway at 116th Street was Emily Dickinson’s:Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawnIndicative that suns go down;The notice to the startled grassThat darkness is about to pass.

Valeria Luiselli

Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.

George Steiner

You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.

Nick Hornby

The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.

Flannery O'Connor

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

Pico Iyer

This is a court of law young man not a court of justice.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could some blunders and absurdities have crept in forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write

Xi Chuan

Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.

Alejandro Zambra

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

Virginia Woolf

Behold! I do not give lectures on a little charity. When I give I give myself.

Walt Whitman

All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.

Javier Cercas

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.

Cheryl Strayed

You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man and to the man with special talents this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself.

José Ortega y Gasset

Arguments out of a petty mouth are unanswerable.

Joseph Addison

I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.

H.L. Mencken

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding...If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is a posture of grace.

Marilynne Robinson

A good indignation brings out all one's powers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a different slant, more than anything else they know all the secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage of to force their way into consciousness.

Christa Wolf

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

Virginia Woolf

The love of liberty is the love of others the love of power is the love of ourselves.

William Hazlitt

Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

Nick Hornby

Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Depression is rage spread thin.

George Santayana

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin

The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.

Edward Verrall Lucas

I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised.

Plutarch

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

Barbara Kingsolver

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