Quotes by Essayists - Page 24

Vandals listen only when others are stronger.If vandals are equal or strongerTheir word is the last word.

Dejan Stojanovic

When I Read the Book"When I read the book, the biography famous, And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life,Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Walt Whitman

Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture.

Chuck Klosterman

While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

Barbara Kingsolver

You may have noticed that people in bus stations, if they know you also are alone, will glance at you sidelong, with a look that is both piercing and intimate, and if you let them sit beside you, they will tell you long lies about numerous children who are all gone now, and mothers who were beautiful and cruel, and in every case they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed--that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in a book, could have made their condition so extreme. And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying. Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever been otherwise. Loneliness is absolute discovery.

Marilynne Robinson

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

George Santayana

If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which runs, "The Gods are to each other not unknown."Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to each other, and cannot otherwise.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons.

Dejan Stojanovic

Good-nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.

William Hazlitt

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

H.L. Mencken

My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.

Jorge Luis Borges

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man but he is brave five minutes longer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own.

Dejan Stojanovic

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.

Roland Barthes

The night is still waiting.

Dejan Stojanovic

Does not… the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Adam Gopnik

Disease often comes with a smiling face.

Dejan Stojanovic

Pride ruined the angels.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life into death— Life’s other shape, No rupture, Only crossing.

Dejan Stojanovic

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

Virginia Woolf

The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

E B White

Meanwhile, back in the real world, my first instinct is a sort of stupid ducking motion I’ve learned from the movies, and I have the sure sense I’m going to be shot in the neck, where I feel particularly exposed and vulnerable.

Charles D'Ambrosio

No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.

Siri Hustvedt

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.

Kenzaburō Ōe

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

H.L. Mencken

It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.

Charles Dudley Warner

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

Lewis Thomas

Trust men and they will be true to you treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. “We, the women of the United States,” she told the bronze Lafayette, “denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.

Sarah Vowell

Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgement. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

Jonathan Franzen

The arrogant elimination of the Djaouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.

Wole Soyinka

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

Emil M. Cioran

Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all...

Marilynne Robinson

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

Ben Lerner

Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out of malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavourable impression it is not necessary that certain things should be true but that they have been said.

William Hazlitt

a single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.

Barbara Kingsolver

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

James Richardson

Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance—they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved—the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish to express in my paintings. The memory—of the movement—of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas.

Sarah Ruhl

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?

Stanisław Lem

Do not be to yourself more that God may be to you.

Sorin Cerin

We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself.

Marilynne Robinson

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

Flannery O'Connor

It's better to have nothing,' the children were saying.

Marilynne Robinson

alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know

Virginia Woolf

I'd like to look below my eyes and see not language staring back at me, not sentences or single words or awkward pen lines, but a surface clear and burnished as glass.

William H. Gass

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.

Arnold Bennett

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

Roland Barthes

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

Thomas Carlyle

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Mark Slouka

We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.

William Styron

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

Flannery O'Connor

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.

Stanisław Lem

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

H.L. Mencken

From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge.

Al Álvarez

There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate, insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor.

Marilynne Robinson

Is it not possible — I often wonder — that things we have felt with great intensity have an experience independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible,in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? …Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past

Virginia Woolf

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

George Santayana

Previous 1 … 22 23 24 25 Next