Quotes by Essayists - Page 23

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.[From the preface to Leaves Grass]

Walt Whitman

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

Arnold Bennett

Your image has receded till it is like the thinnest shadow of the old moon... a thin silver edge appeared, and now you hang like a sickle over my life.

Virginia Woolf

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

Flannery O'Connor

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

Virginia Woolf

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

Flannery O'Connor

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

Thomas de Quincey

Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.

Virginia Woolf

When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?

Chuck Klosterman

L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.

Charles Baudelaire

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

Shalom Auslander

Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.

John Crowley

A wise man, once he is past fifty, does not befuddle his senses with strong drink, nor make violent love in the cool spring night, nor dance on his hands.

Frans G. Bengtsson

The Death's Field is the mirror which allows us the knowledge of the world we living in.

Sorin Cerin

Do not expect peace with the enemy whose worth you do not recognize.

Sorin Cerin

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think all the walks I want to take all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.

John Burroughs

Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning.

Dejan Stojanovic

The ability for a woman to be free is connected with her ability to love another woman.

Susan Griffin

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

Arthur Miller

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.

Roland Barthes

I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretence Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes! I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet!

Arthur Miller

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

Thomas Carlyle

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

William Hazlitt

There is always the question why And there is always life, Which doesn't need an answer.

Dejan Stojanovic

The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven.

Susan Griffin

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual for what the gods had given him.

Max Beerbohm

I see great things in baseball.

Walt Whitman

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

Flannery O'Connor

Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie, and apply subtle pressure while their wearer is speaking frankly and straightforwardly of other matters.

Anne Hollander

That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this.

Barbara Kingsolver

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

Virginia Woolf

Too often, feelings arrive too soon, waiting for thoughts that often come too late.

Dejan Stojanovic

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

H.L. Mencken

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Virginia Woolf

Men like nails lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.

Walter Savage Landor

...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

Salman Rushdie

It is only too evident that the invisible agitations of the kingdoms within us are arbitrarily set on foot by the thoughts we shelter. Our myriad intuitions are the veiled queens who steer our course through life, though we have no words in which to speak of them. How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words!

Maurice Maeterlinck

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

David Shields

They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.

Virginia Woolf

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.

William Hazlitt

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and to have it found out by accident.

Charles Lamb

I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

Virginia Woolf

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

Thomas Lynch

You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.

Marilynne Robinson

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

Nick Hornby

Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.

H.L. Mencken

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

Barbara Kingsolver

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty hesitation or incongruity.

William Hazlitt

When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of "The Vicar of Wakefield." These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.

Anne Fadiman

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Paul Valéry

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

At certain moments, words are nothing; it is thetone in which they are uttered.

Paul Bourget

None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.

William Hazlitt

We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.

Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

Jorge Luis Borges

She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?

Anne Carson

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

Virginia Woolf

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

Roland Barthes

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